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Britain faces the unsettling possibility of seeing its debt rating downgraded, after credit ratings firm Standard & Poor's said Thursday it has revised the country's outlook to negative from stable.

The outlook revision does not trigger a formal re-evaluation of Britain's rating -- unlike being put on credit watch -- but does mean that policy makers have to be aware that a downgrade may happen if public finances do not improve.

Britain's finance chief Alistair Darling predicted that the country's debt position, which aggregates borrowing through the years, is expected to rise to 59 percent of gross domestic product in 2009-10, rising to a peak of 79 percent in 2013-14. When the government came into office in 1997, it said one of its main economic policies was to keep debt around 40 percent.

The statistics office said earlier that net debt stood at 53.2 percent of GDP at the end of April.