At the monetary schedule, Chancellor Rachel Reeves once again blamed the Conservatives for leaving a “£22bn black hole” in the community finances.

A update from the Office for monetary schedule Responsibility (OBR), which makes forecasts for the government, found there had been information it should have been given by the Treasury, but only listed a £9.5bn shortfall.

Nonetheless, it said forecasts in March would have been “materially different” if it had known about all the previous government’s spending plans.

Conservative chief Rishi Sunak said the OBR had declined to back Reeves’s claims of a £22bn black hole, saying: “It actually appears nowhere in their update.”

Reeves said the £22bn came from the £9.5bn of spending plans reported by the OBR, another £7bn before the March monetary schedule, and a further £5.6bn between March and the complete of July including community sector pay awards made by Labour.

Government ministers have repeatedly used the figure to justify the selection to cut the winter fuel settlement and raise taxes.

Accompanying a monetary schedule that increased spending by £70bn a year, the OBR published a update on 30 October looking at whether there had been information about pressures on spending that it should have known about in February when it was working on its forecasts to leave with the March monetary schedule.

It asked the Treasury for an approximate of these pressures and was given a figure of £9.5bn, which is considerably below the £22bn in the July update.

“Had we known that information we would have had a materially different view about the level of community spending this year,” OBR head Richard Hughes told BBC information.

“We can’t declare how different that would have been because we would have had to have had a different exchange with the Treasury in the light of that information.”

Reeves told BBC information that the rest of the £22bn was overspent between the monetary schedule and the 4 July election.

Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for budgetary Studies ponder tank said Reeves “may be overegging the £22bn black hole”.

The government published a breakdown of how it had got from the Treasury’s £9.5bn shortfall in February to the £22bn “black hole”.

It said that there was another £7bn between February and the actual monetary schedule in March, as departments found out about recent spending pressures and the government spent more on the NHS and the Household back pool

There was a final £5.6bn between then and late July, which includes almost a month when Labour was in power.

That was largely caused by increases in community sector pay.

It was the Labour government that accepted the recommendations of the Pay Review Bodies (PRBs), but they said that the previous government should have budgeted for the boost having seen the PRB reports in May and June.

The £21.9bn figure was in an audit published by the Treasury at the complete of July – just a few weeks after Labour came to power.

The document looked at areas of community spending which are set to leave over monetary schedule this year, including:

• community sector pay rises
• Overspending on sure projects, such as supporting the asylum structure
• Unforeseen costs, such as worth rise being higher than expected
• Military assistance to Ukraine.

At the period, the OBR wrote that it had not been made aware of the extent of overspends and said it would investigate.

To put those figure into context, in the Spring monetary schedule it was expected that total community spending this year would be £1,226bn. Either £9.5bn or £22bn would be a tiny proportion of that.

But by the standards of government overspends, either would be unusually large.

Spending was much higher than expected due to Covid in 2020 and 2021 and also almost £10bn higher than expected in 2023 because of worth rise caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Outside those years there have not been overspends close to £9.5bn.

This piece was originally published on 3 September 2024 and has been updated following the OBR update that accompanied the 30 October monetary schedule

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