LONDON, Dec 22 (Reuters) – British finance minister Rachel Reeves has asked the country’s budget watchdog to publish its next \u200beconomic and public finance forecasts – but not an assessment \u200cof her progress on meeting her fiscal targets – on March 3, the government \u200csaid.<\/p>\n
Reeves has asked the independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) to prepare the forecast which will provide an interim view of the economy, the Treasury said on Monday.<\/p>\n
In her November budget, Reeves set out plans \u2060for the OBR to \u200ccheck if the government is on course to meet its budget rules – including a pledge to balance \u200dday-to-day spending with tax revenues by 2030 – once a year instead of twice.<\/p>\n
“The government will respond to the March forecast through a statement to \u200bparliament, in line with the government\u2019s commitment to deliver one \u200cmajor fiscal event a year at the budget,” the Treasury said.<\/p>\n
“This approach gives families and businesses the stability and certainty they need and supports the government\u2019s growth mission,” it said.<\/p>\n
Speculation about how Reeves would get the public finances back on target stretched for \u2060months in run-up to her annual \u200bbudget on November 26, damaging confidence among \u200bbusinesses and consumers, according to surveys.<\/p>\n
The OBR last month lost its chair Richard Hughes who resigned after an \u200dinvestigation into failures \u2060to safeguard budget documents which led to the early release of key details of Reeves’ budget.<\/p>\n
Reeves told lawmakers earlier this \u2060month that it was unlikely the OBR would have a new permanent \u200cchair before the March publication.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Muvija M and \u200cSam Tabahriti, Editing by William Schomberg)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LONDON, Dec 22 (Reuters) – British finance minister Rachel Reeves has asked the country’s budget watchdog to publish…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":330532,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[128939,84,1294,128938,67,50120,1445,50705,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-330531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-budget-rules","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-fiscal-targets","tag-obr","tag-office-for-budget-responsibility","tag-rachel-reeves","tag-the-government","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330531\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/330532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}