Alan Budd

He was temporarily head of Her Majesty's Government's Office for Budget Responsibility during 2010.

In May 2010 he came out of retirement to be the interim Chairman of the Office for Budget Responsibility, set up by Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne to assess the state of public finances and issue economic forecasts.

He described this as "the most exciting challenge of my professional life". In July 2010 it was announced that he would not continue in the role after his initial 3-month contract expired.

Among his activities as an economist, he is a governor of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research; a founder member of the UK-Japan 21st Century Group; an executive editor of World Economics and a member of the editorial advisory board of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy. He is also a senior adviser to Credit Suisse First Boston and a consultant to the G8 Group. In 2005, he was appointed to the board of the IG Group, a spread betting firm founded by Stuart Wheeler.

He left the MPC in May 1999, and between August 1999 and 2008 was Provost of The Queen's College, Oxford.

Budd was a member of the Independent Review Panel on the Future Funding of the BBC (1999), and chairman of the Gambling Review Body which produced the Gambling Review Report (2001). In 2004 he was asked to investigate the circumstances surrounding the issue of a visa to the nanny of Kimberly Quinn, the lover of David Blunkett, the then Home Secretary; Budd's report concluded that there was no evidence that Mr Blunkett had personally interfered in the visa application, but that he was "able to establish a chain of events linking Mr Blunkett to the change in the decision on [the] application." Blunkett resigned as home secretary after being told in advance of the report's findings.

Budd was elected Provost (1999-2008) of The Queen's College, Oxford University and is an Honorary Fellow of the College.

Budd was knighted in the 1997 New Year Honours. He was awarded an Honorary DSc degree by the University of Salford in 2008. He was appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire (GBE) in the 2013 New Year Honours for services to economic policy and the Office for Budget Responsibility.

Between 1991 and 1997, he was chief economic adviser to the Treasury, and headed the government economic service.

During the 1980s he was a professor of economics and director of the Centre for Economic Forecasting at the London Business School. Other appointments have included group economic adviser, Barclays Bank (1989–91), and membership of the Advisory Board for Research Councils (1990–91).

From 1979 to 1981 he was Special Adviser at the Treasury in Margaret Thatcher's government. Reflecting on his position during this time, Budd expressed concerns that the policies that were implemented to allegedly reduce inflation might, in fact, have had a hidden agenda. In a documentary interview, Budd postulated that Thatcher's actual goal might have been to deliberately raise unemployment in order to reduce the strength of the working classes and re-created a reserve army of labour to allow capitalists to make high profits.

After various academic roles, he became senior economic advisor to HM Treasury between 1970 and 1974. Alan Budd was featured in Adam Curtis's 1992 documentary Pandora's Box, in which he was being interviewed about his time as economic advisor to the treasury.

Sir Alan Peter Budd GBE (born 16 November 1937) is a prominent British economist, who was a founding member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) in 1997.