Reeves’ OBR Downgrade Is the Hit British Chancellors Dread

The last person to suffer a productivity downgrade of the kind Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves faces in the run-up to a UK budget just happens to be one of the Tory predecessors she blames for her predicament.

The Office for Budget Responsibility, whose forecasts underpin UK budgets, is poised to hand Labour’s Reeves a hit of as much as £20 billion ($26 billion) by lowering its estimates for UK productivity by 0.3 percentage points. The downgrade is driven by the OBR having been too optimistic about Britain’s economy in recent years, and it’s something the independent watchdog last did in 2017.