Reeves’ UK Rules Will Fail to Tackle Debt, Former OBR Boss Says

Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rules are “among the loosest the UK has had in its history” and do little to bring borrowing under control compared with other advanced economies, the former head of the government’s spending watchdog said.

Richard Hughes, who resigned as chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility last November after it accidentally leaked details of the chancellor’s budget an hour early, told lawmakers in the UK’s upper house that Reeves’ self-imposed rules are no constraint on growth as they allow her to run “quite a big structural deficit.”