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Budget Responsibility and National Audit Bill [Lords]

It is early, Mr Deputy Speaker, but I understand your point about the ticking clock. Amendment 2 seeks to require the Treasury to place in the Library the costing methods, models and assumptions that underpin all the revenue projections, implications, yield estimates and so forth from each Budget announcement. Hon. Members will know that the Red Book produced at each Budget contains a number of costing projections, and there is always a fantastic table somewhere towards the end of the document which gives a sense of the revenue gains or losses, depending on each tax or public spending measure in the Budget. In Committee, it became clear that the Office for Budget Responsibility will have the right to gain some insight into the detailed methodologies that the Treasury uses to underpin the assumptions and costings. The methodologies are therefore publishable, because they can be transferred to the OBR, and all that amendment 2 seeks to do is to share them with the wider world, and in particular with Parliament, because if hon. Members are to scrutinise effectively the assumptions on which the Chancellor makes various decisions, the methodologies and costings used to underpin those calculations should be transparent. In order to support full and proper scrutiny, and to ensure that we can debate those Budget decisions effectively, we think it a reasonable request that the Treasury should place those costings and methodologies in the Library. It would be inconsistent, given the Prime Minister's protestations about"““a new generation that understands and believes in openness, transparency, accountability””," for those models not to be in the public domain. We should not have to rely on freedom of information requests to elicit such information from the Treasury; if the OBR has it, so should Parliament. The amendment is very simple, and we should not simply have to have faith to trust the Chancellor's judgments. If we are to have such transparency, we should all be able to see right through to the methodologies, and perhaps to challenge and test them. Amendment 6, on a different matter, seeks to ensure that the OBR, when it does publish its reports, gives those changes to Parliament first. If hon. Members look in the Bill, they will see a simple clause that states: "““The Office must—" publish the report, lay it before Parliament, and send a copy of it"- I am not sure whether it is to be sent first class- "to the Treasury." All our amendment seeks to do is to place the word "subsequently" after the words "Parliament, and". In other words, Parliament should have those reports first and the Treasury should get them subsequently-although I do not particularly mind if it gets them at the same time. If we are in an era when the Office for Budget Responsibility is truly impartial and does not help one political party, or the governing party of the day, more than it would the Opposition, I am sure that we could come to some arrangement whereby the official Opposition would happily respect any market-sensitive data contained within the OBR reports-but we should have access to them at the same time. The Chancellor suggested, I think, during his interview with Andrew Marr at the weekend, that he knew what the OBR's growth forecasts would be when it downgraded those forecasts. He has days and days to prepare his case and the Budget, but of course the rest of Parliament does not have that time. If the legislature is as important as the Executive-as I believe it is-there is a reasonable case to be made for the legislature to have access to the reports from the independent OBR simultaneously when the Treasury receives them. That is the essential point about amendment 6. The amendments embody two simple requests to help to improve transparency and access for Parliament.