EXPERT WHOSE SUMS DON’T ADD UP
WHEN he was appointed as Britain’s so- called ‘ fiscal policeman’, Robert Chote couldn’t have hoped for more effusive praise. George Osborne hailed him as ‘one of the most credible independent voices on the public finances’. That was six years ago when he was chosen to be director of the Office for Budget Responsibility, the body set up by the Government to fulfil its promise to make economic policy-making more transparent.
Its aim was to try to restore public trust in forecasting after successive Chancellors had been accused of getting Treasury officials to cover up their mistakes by using bogus statistics. However, Osborne’s humiliating admission yesterday that the financial figures he had set out in November – endorsed by the OBR – were deeply flawed is also hugely embarrassing for Chote.
Mischievously, many MPs – Tory and Labour – were heard muttering last night that his forecasts are becoming criminally negligent. It isn’t the first time Chote and his team have been rebuked. In 2012, his forecasting was branded ‘appalling’ and a ‘disaster’ by Doug McWilliams, the chief executive of the Centre for Economics and Business Research. Indeed, the OBR has often been accused of being the Chancellor’s in-house prophets who keep getting their forecasts wrong.
As for Chote, the 48-year-old has been criticised for exploiting the way Osborne clearly respects him by acting some times as ‘one man judge and jury’ on the state of the British economy. He trained as a journalist, and was once economics editor of the Financial Times – when he had a series of run-ins with the then Chancellor, Gordon Brown, and his sidekick Ed Balls. Relations were so bad at one point that Brown’s aides tried to get Chote’s editor to move or sack him.
Undaunted, Chote’s career blossomed and in 2002 he became director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies. For eight years, he appeared in the media, fearlessly dissecting the economic policies of the main political parties. Inevitably, he continued to hound Mr Brown, whose Budgets were routinely excoriated by Chote’s institute for being ‘all smoke and mirrors’ that hid the true scale of Britain’s economic problems from voters. After Chote was hired to head the OBR (amid accusations the Chancellor had picked him because he would look favourably on a Tory-run Treasury), he got off to an ignominious start – delivering wildly over-optimistic growth forecasts for 2011, 2012 and 2013, which he was forced to revise.
AND last year, the OBR was criticised for appearing to be too close to the Treasury after emails came to light from Osborne’s officials which showed they had tried to get the OBR to provide more upbeat language in its forecasts. An embattled Chote tried to ride out the storm by dismissing the emails as having been sent by a junior official. But the impression remained that he was too close to Whitehall, and the Chancellor in particu- lar. A Cambridge graduate and the son of an Olympic javelin-thrower, Chote had studied at Johns Hopkins University in America and then wrote travel books, including one titled The Alternative Holiday Guide To Exploring Nature In The Wilds Of Europe.
He is married to Sharon White, who is the first female, and first black, head of media regulator Ofcom. She once worked in Tony Blair’s policy unit and the couple were nicknamed ‘Mr and Mrs Treasury’. As the OBR is meant to be completely independent, Whitehall wits commented at the time that there must be no pillow talk between the pair.
The couple live in Hampstead, north London, have two school-age sons and are regular churchgoers. In a recent interview, Chote said he liked economics at school but added: ‘My maths wasn’t good enough to be an academic economist, hence journalism.’ Of his work at the OBR, he said: ‘We can’t guarantee our forecasts will be accurate.’
At least the Chancellor’s erroneous financial figures yesterday proved Robert Chote in that assessment.