Hunt again rebuked for false claim on debt forecast

JEREMY HUNT has been rebuked by the statistics watchdog for the second time this year after wrongly implying that public debt is forecast to fall.

Treasury officials were criticised by the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) for failing to give clarity and context when discussing data, after the Chancellor suggested that debt levels would fall when they will in fact only rise less steeply.

In a tweet on April 25, which was reposted by the Treasury, Mr Hunt said: “To restore our public finances, I had to take some difficult decisions last autumn. But we have made progress. By 2027-28, headline debt levels are reduced by £53.7bn”.

In fact, the figure referred to a change in projections by the Office for Budget Responsibility. In March, it forecast that the national debt will rise by £90bn over the next five years. This is £53.7bn lower than its estimate in November last year but still far higher than the current level of debt.

Mr Hunt’s tweet triggered a complaint from the Labour MP Dame Angela Eagle. She wrote to Sir Robert Chote, chairman of the UK Statistics Authority, warning that the message was “inaccurate and misleading”.

In reply, Sir Robert said that the OSR has spoken with Treasury officials “to emphasise the importance of consistently adopting a transparent and accessible approach to communicating statistics and data”.

He said: “Some readers of the tweet may have assumed that the Chancellor was referring to the forecast change in public sector net debt between the last full financial year and 2027-28.”

In February Ed Humpherson, the OSR’S director general, wrote to the Chancellor’s press secretary, David Pares, to criticise a tweeted graph that gave “a misleading impression” of the slowdown in inflation. The Treasury said it noted the points raised by the OSR and would take action accordingly.

High tax receipts, boosted in particular by strong growth from higher earners and Mr Hunt’s stealth tax raid, have helped the public finances to recover from the pandemic more quickly than the OBR expected, despite high inflation. Tax receipts for this year were revised up by 4pc.