Friday 25 October 2019 4:00 pm | Updated: Friday 25 October 2019 4:01 pm

Oops! Stats body admits whopping public finance error of up to £1.5bn

Dozens of Tory MPs have written to Rishi Sunak demanding “emergency” funding for councils which they say are facing cash pressures “like never before” amid an election year.

The UK’s statistics body admitted to a rare error in its public finance data today, making the UK budget deficit between £1bn and £1.5bn less than what had previously been stated.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has said there was “an error in the measurement of local government social benefits”.

Earlier this week the ONS reported a budget deficit of £40.3bn for the first nine months of the year, excluding public-sector banks.

Last month’s shortfall was £9.4bn.

However, the ONS has now stated that September’s budget deficit was up to £250m wide of the mark.

The ONS said: “We have identified an error in the measurement of local government social benefits in the current financial year to date (April to September 2019) and will be correcting this at the earliest opportunity.”

“We expect to publish a corrected bulletin and dataset early next week,” the body added.

The fixed data will feed into Britain’s sectoral and financial accounts for the release scheduled in December, it said.