BRITAIN OWES £1TRILLION
That’s £1,000,000,000,000 or £16,072 EACH
BRITAIN’S public finances are in the red to the tune of an eye-watering £1 TRILLION, it emerged last night.
The staggering sum equates to £16,072 for every man, woman and child in the country.
The amount owed now stands at a whopping £1,003.9billion – or 64.2 per cent of GDP – up from £883billion a year ago, and its highest since records began in 1993.
A trillion is a one and TWELVE zeros… one thousand billion or ONE MILLION MILLION!
As the symbolic barrier was broken for the first time, the IMF slashed UK growth forecasts with the economy expected to grow much more slowly than predicted.
The Government had been pinning their hopes on growth to help repay the debt.
It leaves spending bills for big Government departments and other major public projects looking tiny by comparison.
The Olympics will cost £9.3billion this summer while the controversial HS2 rail project is forecast to cost £32billion.
Despite busting the £1trillion mark, Chancellor George Osborne is still on track to hit a target set by the Office for Budget Responsibility to reduce borrowing in the financial year to £127billion – despite fears the UK is on the brink of recession.
Central Government spending fell 0.9% last month as the Chancellor’s austerity measures take effect.
Tax revenue also rose with the help of last year’s rise in VAT to 20 % and the levy on banks’ balance sheets.
The Government’s £1trillion debt mountain is the legacy of nearly a decade of the state living beyond its means and the pain caused by the financial crisis.
The debt, which is measured as the state’s liabilities minus its cash, only increased gradually in the early part of the century when the economy was booming.
This figure does not include the liabilities of the part-nationalised banks, which are due to be sold in the future.
When the full impact of the nationalisations are added in, the picture is even worse – net debt hit £2.3trillion, or 149 % of GDP.