The Treasury has been advised to ban the practice of giving the media advance warning of details of what will be in the Budget after one newspaper broke the traditional embargo on publication this year and revealed key elements of George Osborne's speech early.
The London Evening Standard tweeted a picture of the paper's front page on the morning of the Budget on 20 March, before the Chancellor had addressed Parliament. This revealed market-sensitive pre-release information, including the news that the Office for Budget Responsibility was to downgrade its growth forecast for 2013 to 0.6%, and covered the main elements of the economic and fiscal forecasts, and changes to income tax allowances, alcohol and fuel duties.
As a result, Treasury permanent secretary Sir Nicholas Macpherson was asked to review procedures for giving out Budget informationt. His report, just published, recommends that the Treasury introduces a ban on the pre-release of the core of the Budget and the Autumn Statement, which will cover the economic and fiscal projections, the fiscal judgment and individual tax rates, reliefs and allowances.
In his report, Macpherson makes clear that the practice of giving advance warning of what the Budget will contain has been going on for some decades, although he focuses on the period from 2005 to the present day.
While there were elaborate 'Budget purdah' arrangements in use until the late 1990s, with only limited numbers of people able to see advance copies of the Chancellor's speech, these have gradually been replaced by the current approach, whereby news media are given the broad outline of what will be in the Budget so as to prepare information and graphics in advance.
In his report, Macpherson says the pre-release of Budget information has been 'the product of a process of evolution' and says this has resulted in more information being provided than previously.
Macpherson says that the switch by broadcasters and newspapers to real-time, online-focused production has 'changed the risks involved in providing information under embargo', although he accepts that the Evening Standard breach was inadvertent.
'The fact that the change occurred in a piecemeal fashion meant that the overall risk was not assessed. Moreover, while the pre-release was under strict embargo terms, these were uncodified and meant that the Treasury did not have a clear line of sight to, or control over, the risk management within media organisations. With the benefit of hindsight, this was unsatisfactory,' Macpherson said.
The report rejects an alternative approach, whereby Budget details would be subject to a controlled pre-release under much more strict arrangements, similar to those used when the Office for National Statistics (ONS) gives out economic statistics to journalists, who are banned from bringing phones to the briefing and physically cut off from the outside world.
Macpherson argues that the tighter any codified arrangements are, the fewer the benefits which are likely to derive from pre-releasing information under embargo since journalists would not be free to brief all the people needed to prepare news packages. He therefore concludes that the practice should be ended, unless the Chancellor gives explicit agreement to any changes.
