Liz Truss to hold meeting with OBR amid market alarm at mini-Budget

OBR says it offered to produce forecast for mini-Budget but Treasury declined

Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng are set to meet with the head of the Office of Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) on Friday amid market panic over the government’s mini-Budget.

The prime minister and chancellor will hold emergency talks with Richard Hughes in an unusual move that caps off a week of chaos in the financial markets.

A government insider told The Guardian, which first reported that the meeting would take place, that it was “like trying to read the manual after you’ve broken the thing”.

It comes as the OBR confirmed that it could have produced an economic forecast in time for the chancellor’s fiscal event last Friday, but was not asked to do so by Mr Kwarteng.

It adds further details to ongoing objections that the chancellor made his mini-Budget, which included £45bn of tax cuts, without a clear economic forecast to back it up.

In a letter to the Scottish National Party’s Westminster leader Ian Blackford and the party’s shadow chancellor Alison Thewliss, the chair of the OBR confirmed that the body sent “a draft economic and fiscal forecast to the new chancellor on 6 September, his first day in office”.

Mr Hughes wrote: “We offered, at the time, to update that forecast to take account of subsequent data and to reflect the economic and fiscal impact of any policies the government announced in time for it to be published alongside the ‘fiscal event’.”

“In the event, we were not commissioned to produce an updated forecast alongside the chancellor’s Growth Plan on 23 September, although we would have been in a position to do so to a standard that satisfied the legal requirements of the Charter for Budget Responsibility.”

Ms Truss and Mr Kwarteng have insisted their package of tax cuts is the “right plan” to get the economy moving.

The chancellor has come under pressure to bring forward his planned statement setting out how he intends to get the public finances back on track after the OBR said it could produce a preliminary set of forecasts by 7 October.

Mr Kwarteng previously said he would deliver his medium-term fiscal plan explaining how he would get debt falling as a percentage of GDP, alongside the updated OBR forecasts, on 23 November.

The absence of any forecasts to accompany Friday’s “fiscal event” was seen as a key factor in spooking the markets.

Many Tory MPs believe that nearly two months is too long to wait if they are to restore stability.

The OBR was contacted for comment.