Osborne forecast to miss debt target George Osborne is on course to miss one of his two fiscal rules, the European Commission predicted on Wednesday in its latest forecasts for the economy. With less than a month to go before the chancellor makes his autumn statement, the commission's forecasts will concentrate minds at the Treasury, which needs to decide how to handle a missed rule - something it has not had to do since Alistair Darling ditched the previous fiscal rules in 2008. The Commission's predictions are no more accurate than any other forecasting body, but tend to hover close to the average of other forecasts, as do the forecasts of the UK's Office for Budget Responsibility, which produced the official Treasury forecasts. The OBR is likely to agree with the Commission's view on the debt target which stipulated that net public sector debt should be falling as a share of national income by 2015-16. The EC report said: "Overall, it appears that the government may miss its national debt target, of having debt fall as a share of GDP by 2015-16, if no new measures are introduced in the Autumn Statement on 5 December." The Commission did not have time to update its forecast to take in the healthy third-quarter growth data, but it was expecting a good number in any case and one quarter is unlikely to make much of a difference to its medium-term outlook. It concluded: "The outlook for growth remains very weak in the short term with the main risks to the macroeconomic forecast stemming from weaker-than-expected consumption and investment, and increased turmoil in the euro area." While economists in Brussels expected the remainder of 2012 to be "bleak" in the light of bad recent economic data, it expected the economy to return to 0.9 per cent growth in 2013 and to expand by 2 per cent in 2014. These growth rates, while significantly better than the stagnation of the past two years would represent a large downgrade on the OBR's March Budget forecasts and are likely to force Mr Osborne to admit in December that his deficit reduction strategy is off-track, as well as his debt target.