OBR hands lucky George Osborne a £27bn get-out-of-jail-free card

Office for Budget Responsibility now expects higher tax revenues and lower debt interest repayments, but new figures could be inaccurate too

George Osborne has pulled off what should have been impossible: he cancelled his tax credit changes in full, softened the sharpest edges of Whitehall budget cuts and still left himself a 10bn pre-election warchest by 2020.

Speculation had been rife about whose pockets the chancellor would pick in order to pay for the well-signalled U-turn on tax credits. But in the event, Osborne was handed an extraordinary 27bn get-out-of-jail-free card by Robert Chote, the director of the Office for Budget Responsibility.