A Treasury minister contradicted the independent watchdog for public finances, saying it wouldn't be able to produce a forecast in time for the government's mini-budget.
Andrew Griffith, the Treasury's financial secretary, told broadcasters that the growth plan put forward by the prime minister, Liz Truss, and the chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, was a lot of detail and would be impossible for the Office for Budget Responsibility OBR to have produced an accurate forecast in time.
On Thursday night, the OBR confirmed in a letter to an MP that it could have produced an assessment in time but was not asked to do so by the chancellor.
Financial experts have cited the decision of Truss and Kwarteng not to engage with the OBR over the 45 billion tax cuts and 60 billion energy support package unveiled last Friday as one of the main reasons behind market turmoil this week.
Truss will join Kwarteng on Friday at a meeting with Richard Hughes, chair of the OBR, in an unusual move.
Asked by BBC Breakfast why the OBR was not given the opportunity to make an assessment of the plan, Griffith said that the level of detail in the plan made it impossible for the independent watchdog to assess it before the government published it.
The growth plan is full of detail about how this government is going to grow the economy. He said there were forty pages. Details of infrastructure plans that have been long held up that we are going to crack through, detail about how we are going to bring forward the new clean energy revolution. It is up to the OBR to decide how they reflect that in their plans. Griffith said that, despite the fact that I am not going to answer that, I just don't know how many pages were in a normal budget document and how quickly the OBR could turn around an analysis of those plans. It is quite chunky. Griffith appeared on BBC Radio 4's Today programme and appeared to concede that the government had presented the country with a partial plan.
He said the government had yet to set out further measures to support growth in the UK, including changes to housing and industrial action.
Griffith said if he accepted former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney's assessment of the plan as a partial budget, people always wanted the plan tomorrow, they always wanted the definitive numbers.
They wanted the plans to be detailed enough and have all the measures and wrap in all the latest available information.
It's hard to get that balance right for everyone, but there is a balance between having a plan quickly and having a plan that can wrap in details of the measures.