The House of Commons treasury committee has shown some unexpected teeth in the last few days. It was refreshing to see that even the Tories are starting to accept that George Osborne’s barmy austerity budget has increased the chances of Britain suffering a second recession, with the Tory-dominated treasury select committee now agreeing that the coalition’s planned fiscal consolidation “may come too early and cut too deeply, and as such cause the economy to falter, leading to a ‘double-dip’ recession”.

The conclusions of the treasury committee really don’t require much economic understanding. If you have a fragile economic recovery where there is little private demand, then massive public spending cuts and job losses are not likely to generate anything other than higher unemployment, poorer services, both of which will lead to declining tax receipts, higher budget deficits and massive social unrest. But it is still welcome that Tory backbenchers are now prepared to accept this, and the words of committee chairman, Andrew Tyrie, that “I am concerned that those at the bottom appear to pay proportionately more than those in the middle of the income distribution”, show that at least some economic sanity and compassion exists on the Tory benches.

But I was particularly taken by the treasury committee’s discomfort over the so-called office of budget responsibility (OBR) and its supposed independence from the treasury. The question I want to ask is: what is the point of the OBR?

The reality is that the creation of the OBR by George Osborne in May amid great fanfare about a new institution that would guarantee independent and transparent public finances was spinning that would have put Shane Warne to shame. The treasury and the OBR in reality are, to pinch one of George Galloway’s best quips, “two cheeks of the same arse”. The head of the OBR, Sir Alan Budd, admitted as much this week when he said that while the number of permanent staff at the OBR would be between 15 and 20, it would need 100 treasury civil servants to help it produce budget forecasts.

It’s not just the staffing of the OBR that shows how disingenuous a body it is. It doesn’t have a press officer either and Budd has also admitted that they use treasury spinners. Not such a surprise then when earlier this month figures on projected employment levels were somehow released to the press just hours before a debate in the Commons on leaked treasury forecasts of the scale of job cuts in the public sector.

Moreover, few people have actually checked out Alan Budd’s past work as a government adviser. In fact, Budd served as a senior treasury advisor during the Heath government and then was brought back from academia in 1991 to work for first Norman Lamont and then Ken Clarke as the Major government’s chief economic adviser. He also a board member of the IG spread-betting group, owned by the ultra-rightwing Conservative donor and sometime UKIP supporter Stuart Wheeler.

I would like to see an independent statistical body that can make clear and transparent decisions on the state of Britain’s public finance, free from government pressure. Part of the crisis in some Eurozone countries is the result of wildly optimistic economic forecasts by bodies that are closely tied to government with the result that markets don’t know what is and is not reliable. That is one of the factors that has led to the credit rating downgrades that we have seen in a handful of European countries.

But it is palpably obvious that the OBR is not this body since it is neither economically or politically independent. It is effectively being run by the treasury. David Cameron has spent several years calling for a ‘bonfire of the quangos’ – bodies which, in his eyes, waste money and serve no purpose. So here’s an obvious candidate. If they are going to be consistent and honest the OBR should quietly be axed, or replaced by a truly independent statistical agency, because there is simply no point it existing in its current form.