By bizn_fun 
Why, in my judgement, Reeves was misleading on one specific pointpublished at 11:57 GMT
Chris Mason
Political editor
Chancellor Rachel Reeves has been accused of lying and misleading you before her Budget last week.
It is my job, after a careful examination of the facts, to call it, on your behalf, in careful, precise language.
And in my judgement, on one specific element of what the chancellor and the Treasury told us before the Budget, we were misled.
Let’s walk through this, step by step.
On Tuesday 4 November, the chancellor called an extraordinary pre-Budget news conference.
Reeves called that news conference because she wanted to prepare the ground for a big Budget full of difficult choices.
And let’s be clear: much of what we heard from the chancellor in her breakfast speech that morning almost four weeks ago reasonably laid the ground for what was to come.
Crucially, she also talked about productivity, a measure of the output of the economy per hour worked.
The forecaster and watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility, was expected to revise down its estimate for productivity growth.
This decision by the OBR had big implications for Reeves – impacting the numbers, spreadsheets and therefore the calculations and trade-offs she would have to make. In isolation, that made things harder for her, without question.
In other words, nothing she said in that news conference was wrong.
But – and this is the key point – we now know she knew something then she didn’t share with us that morning.
And that is that tax receipts were much better than expected and more than offset the reduction in productivity growth.