Country for sale, 64m owners

Valuable assets

Britain would have a price tag of £8,063,000,000,000 if the whole country — and everything in it — was put up for sale.

The sum — just over £8 trillion ($17.3 trillion) — has been calculated by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). It includes the value of every house in the country, with all other buildings, machinery, bridges, roads, the shares people own and the money in their bank accounts. It means if the public decided to sell the country and everything in it as a job lot, Britain’s 64.6 million people would each get £125,000 — or £302,000 per household, the ONS said.

Wesley Harris, an ONS statistician, said: “Residential property is the biggest and most valuable nonfinancial asset in the whole economy. Looking at the data we have been compiling since 1997, the value of dwellings in the UK has increased by over three times.” currency in circulation and money in bank accounts buildings, roads, railways, bridges, sports stadia, warehouses and pipelines machinery, equipment including cars and computers and weapons systems

The ONS valued the country’s housing stock at £5.1 trillion, more than 60 per cent of the total price tag. Between 2013 and the end of 2014, houses increased in value by £408 billion, or 9 per cent. Residential property has gone up in value by £3.7 trillion since 1997.

The rise was mainly down to increasing house prices rather than more homes being built.

However, the financial sector experienced a slump. “The financial corporations sector had an estimated net worth of £-197 billion at the end of 2014, a decrease of £364 billion (219 per cent) compared with 2013,” said the ONS. “This was the largest annual decrease and the first negative net worth for financial corporations since 2006.”

Setting aside the buildings and other physical assets owned by financial institutions such as banks, building societies and insurance companies, their “financial net worth” decreased by £367 billion to £-360 billion, and was the main contributory factor in the sector’s fall.

The Government was also in the red. “The estimated net worth of the general government sector decreased to £-450 billion at the end of 2014, meaning that the Government continued to owe more than it owned in assets.”