Why, in my judgement, Reeves was misleading on one specific point

You may have seen the storm of headlines over the weekend, variously accusing Chancellor Rachel Reeves of lying and misleading you ahead of her Budget last week.

It’s my job to call it out in careful, accurate language, on your behalf, after carefully examining the facts.

And in my judgment, on one specific element of what the Chancellor and the Treasury told us before the Budget, we were misled.

Let’s go through it step by step. On Tuesday 4 November, the Chancellor called an extraordinary pre-Budget news conference.

It was unique and voluntary – such a thing had never happened before.

Reeves called that press conference because she wanted to lay the groundwork for a bigger budget full of tough choices.

And let’s be clear: much of what we heard from the Chancellor in his breakfast speech almost four weeks ago sets the stage appropriately for what is to come.

She made it clear that big tax increases were coming, and she was right. He talked about the importance of the measures to efforts to address the cost of living, and they were in his budget last week.

He expressed a desire for greater flexibility in the spreadsheets against his self-imposed fiscal rules – so-called “headroom”. He also worked on that, as he did on maintaining long-term, investment spending.

Importantly, he also talked about productivity, which is a measure of what the economy produces per hour. The forecaster and watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility, was expected to revise down its estimate of productivity growth.

This decision by the OBR had major implications for Reeves – affecting numbers, spreadsheets and therefore calculations and trading closures. In isolation, without any questions, things became difficult for him.

In other words, nothing he said at that press conference was wrong.

But – and this is the key point – we now know that she knew something she didn’t share with us that morning – and that is that tax receipts were much better than expected and more than offset the shortfall in productivity growth.

The OBR has since made it very clear and set out a timetable for what it told the Treasury when – including whether the Chancellor knew about the tax receipts figures at the time of the news conference.

In fact, 10 days later the Treasury decided to volunteer this fact about tax receipts, when the Financial Times reported that there would be no change in income tax rates in the Budget, and then the market wondered how on earth the numbers would turn out.

The briefing that followed was given to me and others, which was accurate and aimed at reassuring those markets – and which meant that tax receipts are much stronger than we expected, so that’s OK.

So, at that press conference a month ago, the Chancellor decided to voluntarily share some information of which he was aware, but he decided not to share some other information of which he was also aware – only deciding to share it when he considered it politically expedient 10 days later.

I should say that the Treasury says it is unfair to say that she was misleading because at the time of the news conference the Chancellor faced a huge hole in her spreadsheet about the buffer or headroom she wanted to create and the policy options she wanted to choose.

The numbers support this.

And the OBR could say that the Chancellor was right to be conservative and cautious, or that he should have based his plans on early versions of the watchdog’s forecast – because that would be the right thing to do. OBR boss Richard Hughes will answer questions from MPs at the Treasury committee on Tuesday morning.

But the words of that day did not make the same impression with the facts that we learned later and that the Chancellor knew at the time.