Budget Responsibility and National Audit Bill [HL]

My Lords, in many ways the points that I want to make here have already been made by my noble friend Lord Barnett regarding an earlier amendment, and I run the risk of being accused by the Minister of, in his term, raking over the coals again. The key issue here, though, is to ensure that Mr Robert Chote and his two fine colleagues on the committee of the Office for Budget Responsibility are not put in a place where their words are taken to be saying more than they actually do. As noble Lords know, I continue to express support for the creation of the OBR and of the appointment of Mr Chote and his two colleagues. I also commend the Government for the steps that they have taken to ensure that there is an independent process around appointments to the committee of the OBR. I regard the document published last week as being a significant improvement in financial governance in the country. It is therefore perhaps somewhat churlish to say, ““This is all very good but perhaps we should have a little more””, but there was one thing missing last week in the Chancellor’s Statement to another place. He put a lot of spin, to use tabloid language, on the OBR statement. He is not the first Chancellor to do that; his predecessor but one was particularly prone at times of the Budget and the Pre-Budget Report to putting spin on information contained in the Budget—indeed, to the point of often forgetting to mention things that were in the Budget which were subsequently regarded as being very important. I would not want to see the OBR used in the same way. The purpose of my amendment is to seek to ensure that, when the report of the committee of the Office for Budget Responsibility is produced for Parliament by the Chancellor or by a Treasury Minister, there is a reasonable test of the completeness and the accuracy with which the report is described to Parliament. As the noble Lord, Lord Barnett, has already indicated, the report last week is replete with language about uncertainties, such as fan charts and the use of terminology to suggest probabilities and risks around central forecasting. Indeed, the Minister, in answering questions in the House and in other interjections, has referred on many occasions to significant improvements in the form of presentation including, in particular, the use of fan charts. Yet in the Statement made in the other place by the Chancellor, as repeated in our own House by the Minister, we were given the sense that this was an endorsement, a seal of approval, for the Government’s economic strategy. There was little or no any mention of any of the risks and uncertainties around forecasts, and no sense of a complete picture. For instance, the OBR is clear that over the next few years there will be a significant squeeze on real incomes. The difference between the projected rate for the RPI and the rate at which earnings are to increase is significantly negative over the next few years. There was not a single word of mention about that factor, which is very important for many families in this country, in the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Statement to the other place. I am being fair and honest in my observation that I believe that his predecessor but one may well have been inclined to give a similarly high-level summary of the content of the OBR report, but I suggest that if the OBR was in a position to say that it did not believe that the way in which its conclusion was presented to Parliament represented a fair, balanced and complete presentation, that would be a significant endorsement of the independence of the OBR and would protect it from the danger that my noble friend Lord Barnett cited earlier—namely, that the committee of the OBR, in its naivety, may be used by politicians to project a different set of conclusions from those which the committee had in mind. I beg to move.