obr

name	obr
description	Query the Office for Budget Responsibility — the UK's independent fiscal watchdog. Wraps OBR's RSS feeds (all publications + per-topic) and HTML page fetcher for Economic and Fiscal Outlooks (EFO), Fiscal Risks and Sustainability reports (FSR), Welfare Trends, Forecast Evaluation Reports (FER), and policy costings of Budget / Spring Statement measures. Use when the question is about OBR forecasts, fiscal headroom, or scrutiny of HM Treasury policy. Treasury Committee material; pair with the `committees` facility for the resulting parliamentary scrutiny.
license	Open Government Licence v3.0 (Crown copyright, OBR)
metadata	{"facility":"obr","cli-alias":"obr","base-url":"https://obr.uk","provenance":{"tier":3,"operator":"Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR)","service":"obr.uk","upstream-data":"OBR's own published forecasts + costings + risk assessments + chart pack data","citation-short":"via Office for Budget Responsibility","citation-formal":"Office for Budget Responsibility, retrieved {date}, OGL v3.0","confidence":"authoritative","confidence-notes":"Authoritative for OBR's own forecasts and analyses. OBR is a statutory non-departmental public body created by the Budget Responsibility and National Audit Act 2011; its forecasts underpin every UK Budget."}}

Office for Budget Responsibility

Base URL: https://obr.uk

OBR provides the official UK fiscal forecast that the Chancellor must use in setting policy. Its twice-yearly Economic and Fiscal Outlook is published alongside the Budget and the Spring Statement; its Fiscal Risks and Sustainability report (every two years) is the long-horizon counterpart. OBR also costs every Budget measure and periodically evaluates the accuracy of its own past forecasts.

There is no documented JSON API. The library wraps:

Surface	Path	What
All-publications RSS	/topics/feed/	Recent OBR publications as XML
Per-topic RSS	/{slug}/feed/	One topic feed (e.g. efo, fsr, wmar, policy-costing)
WP REST (where exposed)	/wp-json/wp/v2/posts	WordPress search when available
HTML page	/{path}	Fetch any HTML page for LLM extraction

Useful topic slugs

Slug	Document
efo	Economic and Fiscal Outlook (twice a year, alongside fiscal events)
fsr	Fiscal Risks and Sustainability report
wmar	Welfare Trends Report
forecast-evaluation-report	Forecast Evaluation Report (FER)
policy-costing	Individual policy costing notes (per measure in a Budget)

CLI

parl obr feed --text                                      # all-publications RSS
parl obr topic-feed efo --text                            # EFO feed
parl obr topic-feed policy-costing --text                 # costing notes feed
parl obr reports --search "headroom" --take 5             # WP search if exposed
parl obr page "publications/economic-and-fiscal-outlook-march-2026/" --text

The page command returns raw HTML — useful for asking an LLM to extract the headline forecast numbers from a published outlook.

Joins to Parliament

• OBR EFO → Treasury Committee evidence: every Budget, the Treasury Committee takes oral evidence from the OBR's senior team. Search committee oral evidence by date and committee id.
• OBR forecast → Budget debate: floor debate on the Budget Resolutions and the Finance Bill cites OBR figures throughout; use hansard search-debates.
• OBR costing → Finance Bill clause: a policy-costing note attaches to a specific Budget measure that becomes a clause in the Finance Bill.

Caveats

• HTML-only. Numeric forecast data (the public-finance tables, the supplementary data tables) lives in per-publication Excel workbooks linked from the HTML landing page. The page command returns the landing page; download the workbook separately for structured numbers.
• OBR publications are dated by fiscal event, not calendar date. Two EFOs a year (typically March + October/November).
• Costings come in two forms: per-policy notes (specific to one measure) and the policy-measures chapter inside each EFO. Both are authoritative.

Provenance to cite

Tier 3 — third-party (OBR), authoritative.

• Inline cite: "(via Office for Budget Responsibility)" — once per paragraph.
• For numeric claims, cite the publication and the table number: "OBR EFO October 2025, Table 1.1, retrieved {date}". Forecast numbers change between EFOs — always cite the specific EFO.
• OBR is statutorily independent of HM Treasury. Don't conflate OBR's central forecast with HM Treasury's policy assumptions.
• See ../../docs/provenance.md.