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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots. I am Tim Shipman, the Pleist Glad of the Spectator,

and today I'm delighted to be joined after the budget by Professor David Miles,

who's Professor of Economics at Imperial College London and also a member of the Committee of the Office for Budget Responsibility,

the Watchdog, which casts its judgment on the budget. Welcome, David.

Thank you. Good to be here. So, you guys find yourselves always at the sort of heart of the story on days like this, almost as much as the

Chancellor herself. And that was never more so yesterday when, for the first time ever, the entire budget was published shortly before the

Chancellor stood up. Can you just tell us what happened with that? This is a very serious issue.

It's hugely unfortunate. That's an understatement, if anything. We've launched an investigation

which begins right now. It's going to be overseen by Baroness Sarah Hogg with the input and help of Keirin Martin, who's formerly chief executive of the National Cybersecurity Centre. I think they'll get to the bottom of what happened. I'm not clear on what happened and how someone got access to our assessment of the budget and the fiscal and economic outlook.

Some 40 minutes, 45 minutes before the Chancellor actually stood up.

But this is serious.

We're going to find out what happened and what needs to happen now to make sure this cannot happen again.

And presumably if someone is identified as responsible, there'd likely be some kind of disciplinary

action. Well, we'll see what the investigation comes up with. But the focus is on stopping

it occurring again, presumably. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Right. Well, that's a very helpful update. Thank you. Look, you guys sit in

judgment to a degree. You're part of the process. What's your assessment of this budget then?

Just give us the sort of big picture here, because there was a lot of talk beforehand about the size of

the black hole, as we call it, the gap between what the government's getting in and what it needs to do to conform

to the Chancellor's own rules. Just give us the raw numbers. How big was the black hole in the end?

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