Danny Alexander said while he accepted the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecast that the economy was set to shrink in the final three months of the year 2013 would see steady growth and the country would avoid another recession.

The BBC reports Alexander said the road to economic recovery was “longer and harder” than expected, but progress had been made.

Speaking on the Andrew Marr show, he said: “The OBR forecast that the final quarter of this year would be negative, but that we would see positive growth slowly returning in every quarter of next year.

“That would suggest that we’re not going to have that happening. But it is an uncertain world out there.

“We’re seeing continuing problems in the eurozone, but I’m happy to rest on the OBR’s forecast, which is a bounce-back from the Olympic boost we saw in the third quarter causing a small negative in the final quarter of this year, but then steady growth slowly starting to return next year and the year after that.”

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