Budget Responsibility and National Audit Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Noakes and Baroness Browning

Monday 6th December 2010 Grand Committee

[Baroness Browning]

My earlier question came from reading the evidence of Professor Wren-Lewis to the Select Committee. He considered that if,

“the Treasury decides that the OBR model is wrong in some sense, I think basically then it is up to the Treasury to decide whether it wants to move to an alternative model or an alternative way of doing things whereby it produces its own forecast and does not rely on the OBR”.

I understand that the Government accepted that when they responded to the Treasury Committee. That was what prompted my earlier question.

[Baroness Noakes]

Perhaps I may suggest to my noble friend that much of the debate in Committee has been concerned with establishing that the OBR is properly independent of the Treasury. One of the corollaries of having an OBR that is properly independent and that we are all jolly keen to see in a separate building, with staff who are not too intertwined with the Treasury, is that the Treasury will have given away the ability to make some its own appraisals of the economic position. Clearly, it cannot leave itself completely denuded. It would be frankly ludicrous if, in setting up the OBR as a completely independent body to inform the public debate and to be the official forecaster, as my noble friend the Minister has repeatedly said, we left the Treasury with no internal capability to judge for itself whether or not it was happy with what was coming out of the OBR. It would therefore be entirely logical for the Treasury to retain some forecasting capability. In extremis, the Treasury may wish to rest its judgments on its internal forecasts, rather than those produced by the independent OBR, but even without those extreme conditions the Treasury will need to be satisfied that what is coming from the OBR is fit for the purpose of decision-making.