The Office for Budget Responsibility has published a 20-page report into the farcicle leak that saw most of Rachel Reeves' Budget accidentally published an hour before the Chancellor stood to address the Commons.
The OBR, the government's chief number crunching arms-length body, describes the premature publication last Wednesday as "the worst failure in the 15-year history of the OBR."
"It was seriously disruptive to the Chancellor, who had every right to expect that the EFO would not be publicly available until she sat down at the end of her Budget speech, when it should, as is usual, have been published alongside the Treasury’s explanatory Red Book.
"The Chair of the OBR, Richard Hughes, has rightly expressed his profound apologies."
The quango immediately tasked its chief of staff to report on how the market-sensitive document was leaked, and has this afternoon published its findings.
Responding to the letter, the Treasury has thanked the OBR for its report, and said that the Chief Secretary will respond "in due course".
Setting out the timeline of the Budget day chaos, the OBR says the documents were first succesfully accessed at 11:35am after having been uploaded to the website by a web developer, to a part of the website the OBR believed was not publicly accessible.
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