Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what the confidence intervals are for the (a) Office for Budget Responsibility's and (b) Bank of England's economic forecasts.

The OBR is widely recognised as providing independent, credible and high-quality analysis and the OECD has described the OBR as a “model independent fiscal institution”.

The OBR is also required by legislation to annually evaluate its forecasts in a Forecast Evaluation Report (link). The OBR also began to publish fan charts demonstrating the confidence intervals around its forecasts for key fiscal metrics in the October 2021 Economic and Fiscal Outlook (link).

The Bank of England’s forecasting capability was reviewed by David Stockton in 2012 (link) and he found that “fundamentally, the forecast process and the associated forecasting tools employed by the Bank in support of its monetary policy decision making are sound.” It was reviewed again by the Bank’s Independent Evaluating Office in 2015 (link). The Bank also publishes confidence intervals summarising the Monetary Policy Committee’s collective judgement of the uncertainty around the forecasts for GDP, unemployment, and CPI inflation, in the Monetary Policy Report (link).