The chancellor said he wanted to manage people’s expectations ahead of the spring budget
In his interview with the BBC’s Nick Robinson, Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, criticised Richard Hughes, head of the Office for Budget Responsibility, for calling the Treasury’s long-term public spending forecasts worse than “a work of fiction”.
Hughes told a Lords committee last month:
Some people call [the projections] a work of fiction, but that is probably being generous when someone has bothered to write a work of fiction and the government hasn’t even bothered to write down what its departmental spending plans are underpinning the plans for public services.
Those words are wrong and they should not have been said.
The government decides spending plans and spending reviews.
It does not look to me like we will have the same scope for cutting taxes in the spring budget that we had in the autumn statement.
And so I need to set people’s expectations about the scale of what I am doing because people need to know that when a Conservative government cuts taxes we will do so in a responsible and sensible way.
As things stand at the moment, things can change, it doesn’t look like I’ll have the kind of room I had for those very big tax cuts in the autumn, and I did mention that to the cabinet, yes.
