Greetings all!
There has been press mention of a new "Office for Budget Responsibility".
For example, the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/may/18/
osborne-office-for-budget-responsibility
Britain's new watchdog for the public finances was last night
working on a fast-track audit after George Osborne announced
that he was removing the temptation for chancellors to "fiddle
the figures" for political ends.
Osborne said he was prepared to cede powers to the new Office
for Budget Responsibility (OBR) in order to restore public faith
in government forecasts for growth and the size of the budget
deficit.
[...]
Osborne said he would base his budget and pre-budget report
judgments on the forecasts provided by a trio of experts at the OBR.
"Again and again, the temptation to fiddle the figures, to nudge
up a growth forecast here or reduce a borrowing number there to
make the numbers add up has proved too great," Osborne said at
his first press conference. "And that is a significant part of
the reason for our current problems. I believe the public should
be able to trust official forecasts for the economy. I want
independent forecasts to become the norm."
The chancellor said he had asked Sir Alan Budd, a former chief
economic adviser at the Treasury and one of the first members
of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, to act as
the interim chairman of the OBR. He will be joined by City
economist Geoffrey Dicks, who has a long track record of
economic forecasting, and former Treasury civil servant Graham
Parker.
[...]
[However] Colin Talbot, professor of public policy and
management at Manchester Business School, warned that the body
was not credible.
He told Public Finance magazine that there was the immediate
problem of producing a forecast for the coming budget.
"The idea that you can conjure up a body out of nowhere to
deliver a forecast in 20 or 30 days is just crazy."
I have also heard references on BBC Radio 4 News in the last
couple of days (though, curiously, I am unable to find any
decent coverage of it on the BBC News website http://news.bbc.co.uk ).
These references have included quotes like "It is better to fit
the policy to the numbers than to fit the numbers to the policy".
Noble stuff! But (as well as Colin Talbot's reservations) I am
seriously wondering how the public can be confident in the forecasts
which will be made by this new body. The ONS had enough problems!
How independent will they really be? And how can we *know*
that they are independent?
Or is this yet another straw man to gull people into feeling
reassured? (Just as much "crime reduction" is focussed on
"reducing fear of crime" -- "How can we get those worried
b*****s off our backs?").
Ted.
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E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <[log in to unmask]>
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861
Date: 18-May-10 Time: 11:20:00
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