Rachel Reeves's Budget mishap leak was the SECOND time it happened after 'pre existing weakness' revealed Spring Statement early

The report says: "The cause, which appears to have been pre-existing, was, in essence, configuration errors which reflected systemic issues.

"These led to a failure to ensure the protections which hide documents from public view immediately before publication were in place."

It also suggested that at the Spring Statement in March, there was a premature access to that forecast web address, around five minutes after the Chancellor started giving her speech in the Commons.

This was around half an hour before normal publication.

The OBR said its leadership must take “immediate steps to change completely” how it publishes twice-yearly reports containing sensitive forecasts.

In conclusion, the report says the failures that led to this error were "longstanding."

In the foreword to the report, Baroness Sarah Hogg and Dame Susan Rice, non-executive members at the OBR, said of the early publication: “It is the worst failure in the 15-year history of the OBR.

"It was seriously disruptive to the Chancellor, who had every right to expect that the Economic and Fiscal Outlook [EFO] would not be publicly available until she sat down at the end of her Budget speech, when it should, as is usual, have been published alongside the Treasury’s explanatory Red Book.

"The Chair of the OBR, Richard Hughes, has rightly expressed his profound apologies."

The report said: "It is of concern that Professor Martin finds that it is very likely that the weaknesses that caused the premature accessing of the November 2025 EFO were pre-existing.

"Indeed, it appears that the March 2025 EFO was accessed prematurely on one occasion, though there is no evidence of any activity being undertaken as a result of that access, and he concludes the most likely explanation is benign."

Sir Keir Starmer said he was “bemused”, but not angry at the timing of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR)’s productivity review.

The Prime Minister said: "Well, I’m not angry at the productivity review. It’s a good thing that reviews like that have done from time to time. I’m bemused."

Sir Keir continued: "Myself, I feel that doing at the end of last government and before we started might have been a good point to do a productivity review so we could know exactly what we were confronted with.

"Doing it 15, 16, months into a government, it had to be done sometime, but picking up the tab for the last government’s failure, it’s been the nature of the beast, frankly, for the last 16 months, but it was given a special emphasis in that exercise.

"I’m not angry, I’m just bemused as to why it wasn’t done at the end of the government rather than done now, but I’m not saying that these reviews aren’t important et cetera."