Parliamentary budget office

WHILE the budget session in the federal and provincial assemblies is in progress, some members of the two Houses of parliament have again raised the need for an independent office within parliament to provide an unbiased analysis of the annual budget to the legislators. The argument is that if members of parliament have to debate various aspects of the budget as informed legislators and exercise oversight on the executive’s produced budget, they need support from an entity which is outside the control of the executive so that the numbers produced by the Ministry of Finance for the budget and by the Ministry of Planning and Development for the Public Sector Development Programme can be scrutinised and independently verified before the parliamentarians provide their feedback and input during the budget debate. In fact, a member of the National Assembly had introduced a private member’s bill titled the ‘Parliamentary Budget Office Bill, 2025’, in the Assembly last year. The bill was referred to the National Assembly Standing Committee on Finance which asked its sub-committee chaired by Dr Nafisa Shah to examine the proposal in depth. As one can gather from media reports, the bill was strongly opposed by the representatives of the finance ministry who complained to the sub-committee that the bill granted excessive powers to the proposed budget office. The ministry also objected to the suggested direct reporting relationship of the proposed office to parliament without taking the ministry into confidence. While the bill was not passed in its original form, it was agreed that the ministry’s finance and revenue divisions would come up with an amended draft for consideration of the sub-committee and the full committee. As the debate on the 2026-27 budget commences, there is no sign that such a draft has been placed before the committee or that the committee has taken that into consideration. A parliamentary budget office is not a novel idea; a number of countries around the