It’s a sad economic choice: accept the need for mounting debts just to achieve moderate growth or crack down on borrowing and get no growth at all.

When there are queues at food banks and child poverty is on the rise, it might seem irresponsible to choose between reckless growth and sober stagnation. Neither option does the poorest any favours, but that appears to be the main dilemma for central bank policymakers.

The US Federal Reserve and Bank of England think they can have it both ways. Not for the first time, they argue that clever regulation of the financial sector can allow for a rise in borrowing to spur moderate growth, without the risks associated with this strategy.

Other state bodies are not getting involved in the debate, instead focusing narrowly on an agenda set by the government and accepting the regulators’ assurances that they are on top of the situation.

Other agencies of the state that participate in this debate refuse to question the tradeoff. Instead they focus narrowly on an agenda set by the government and accept the assurances of the regulators that clever people in positions of seniority are on top of the situation.

Among the bodies that sit on the sidelines is the Office for Budget Responsibility, Britain’s independent economic forecasting body. You might think that from its title it would have a moral duty to question the roots of the government’s economic planning. You would be wrong. The OBR makes forecasts showing us the path for interest rates, inflation, employment, wages, business investment and tax receipts based on the Treasury’s plans, however crazy they might be.

The organisation was the creation of the Treasury; more particularly it was the creation of the then chancellor, George Osborne, and it was not designed to question his policies. This situation became stark in the last years of Osborne’s tenure as he manipulated his tax and spending plans to conjure a smooth path of deficit reduction, knowing the OBR would be forced to follow his lead and simply calculate the impact of Treasury policies.

More recently, the OBR has found itself in hot water over the basis of its forecasts using the budget plans of Osborne’s successor, Philip Hammond.

When it was first created in 2010, the OBR adopted the Treasury view that austerity would have very little impact on potential for economic growth. It predicted a surge in business investment and jobs as if the economy was about to bounce back from a medium-sized recession and not the worst financial crash in a century.

For several years, its reports repeated the same nonsense that wages would soar and annual inflation return to the Bank’s target of 2%, without any regard for what was obvious from just looking around. In this respect it followed the Treasury, many of the economists in the largest City banks and, most importantly, the Bank of England.

After a few years the OBR realised this wasn’t happening and changed its tune. Rather than businesses borrowing to invest, consumers would borrow to spend. However, without inflation-busting wage rises, the money would need to come from somewhere, and that somewhere would be loans. More than that, the consumer would borrow so much on mortgages, credit cards, overdrafts and car loans that total household borrowing would soar above the 2007 level by 2020, the OBR predicted.

Things changed for a while in 2015 after oil prices dived, almost out of the blue. The dramatic fall in the cost of a barrel of oil meant that inflation fell to zero and suddenly lacklustre wage rises of barely 2% became a real boost.

Yet this only accelerated another trend missed by the OBR. Hidden beneath the averages for household debt was the propensity for middle-income households, and especially those where the main wage earners were more than 50 years old, to take the benefit of ultra-low interest rates and real income rises to pay down their mortgages. They spent some of the gain from lower interest rates, but from 2009 onwards they were also embarking on their own austerity programme.

Better late than never, the OBR adopted a new methodology for calculating household debt. Overnight the trend for rising household debt weakened. It was no longer going to rise to credit crunch levels. This was shown most starkly in the OBR forecast conducted for the budget in March.

At the time this re-evaluation was widely welcomed. No longer would Britain’s growth be built on a mountain of debt. That would be comforting, however, if the average household debt figure was representative of most households.

Unfortunately, a large minority of households, many of them living in rented accommodation, are caught in a spiral of unsecured debt that has already sent the total for the UK above £200bn and, according to the OBR, will send it soaring further until it reaches a new peak as a ratio of GDP as soon as 2020.

As part of the OBR’s re-evaluation of mortgage debt, the forecaster found that its overall debt figures more generally failed to add up.

There are four main creditors and debtors in any economy. They are households, companies, the government and foreign investors. At any one time these elements are supposed to be in balance. So if households are spending more than their income would allow, they must be borrowing the balance and another group must be lending.

For the last couple of years the OBR’s figures haven’t added up. Businesses have not stepped in to borrow now that households have cut back. The government has eased back on austerity and the deficit with foreign investors has moderated, but not enough to make up the difference.

The OBR blames the discrepancy on official statistics, which also fail to balance. Yet, while this may be true, it is not hard to see why opposition politicians and more thoughtful Tories believe the OBR is not up to the task of offering an unbiased, critical view of where the Treasury is taking us.

There needs to be a broader, in-depth examination of where the economy is going, especially when the averages for debt, wages and household wealth disguise more than they reveal.

The path chosen by the Treasury is not without huge risks. But the only one it highlights is the risk of higher government borrowing.

Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England since 2013, made reference to the persistent and large borrowing from abroad in a speech last year when he warned that Brexit could test “the kindness of strangers”. That was ignored, leaving Britain’s current-account deficit, which is the largest in the G7 nations, to be factored into the next five-year forecast.

Andrew Bailey, the boss of the main financial watchdog, the Financial Conduct Authority, is concerned that significant numbers of families are drowning in debt. Is anyone listening? Not if the OBR forecast for soaring unsecured personal debt is anything to go by.

Their warnings are not enough. The Labour MPs Frank Field and Rachel Reeves, who head the work and pensions and business select committees, have called for an independent commission to examine Britain’s growing debt problem. Parliament should heed this call and insist one is convened.