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THE GUARDIAN |
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Can you put
a price on the UK? Yes, it's
£4,983,000,000,000
We're hugely rich - but our homes make up more than half the value of UK plc Tania
Branigan Britons may be feeling cash-strapped after Christmas, but as a nation we are rich beyond our wildest dreams: worth almost £5 trillion, in fact. Even Bill Gates, the world's richest man, would blanch at the £4,983,000,000,000 (£4,983bn) pricetag attached to Britain, according to the latest government figures. He is worth a mere £23bn, according to Forbes magazine. "This is the first time we have been able to say what UK plc is worth," said a spokesman for the Office for National Statistics, which released the figures. "It's the first year we have sat down and added everything up to come up with a magic figure." More than half that amount - £2.7 trillion, to be precise - is accounted for by the value of people's homes. But the total also includes personal, commercial and public assets such as vehicles and machinery; and financial assets such as shares and the money in bank accounts. Even intangible assets, such as the value of patents, are included. Commercial and public property accounted for a further £565bn, making it the country's second most valuable asset, while parts of the national infrastructure, such as roads, bridges and pipelines, were valued at £537bn. If the assets could be divided evenly among the British population, each person would be worth almost £85,000. "We found £5 trillion was the current market value of the UK, including the value of the land," said Ian Hill, one of the ONS statisticians who compiled the figures. "That's risen a lot over the last few years because property prices have shot up." In 1994, when residential property was worth only around £1.2 trillion, the country's net worth was £2.8 trillion. People's homes accounted for 43% of the nation's capital, compared with 55% last year. "Information like this has been produced since the 1950s but we now have a much more robust system which enables us to publish in a lot more detail," added Mr Hill. Much of the demand for greater detail came from economists, who use the data to make predictions. "By law, companies are obliged to have balance sheets. In the same way, if we want to know the wealth of the nation, we need a national balance sheet, and that's what these figures really are," said Martin Weale, director of the independent National Institute of Economic and Social Research. "It's nice to have figures that bring this all together because more frequent indices tell us what changes there are, but not how land and housing [values] relate to factories and roads and things like that. "Once you have got a balance sheet you can think of a number of questions you might want to ask; for example, is the country saving enough." Mr Weale warned that the UK's rising "pricetag" was not necessarily a sign that Britons were better off. "Sharp increases in house prices crowd out productive investment. The country as a whole cannot become better off by pushing up house prices, whereas it can by building roads and factories and things like that," he said. "We should be cautious. It's nice for the people who own their homes, but not those who haven't bought them yet - including those who have not been born. In a sense it's paying for the present by robbing the future." The statistics also show that the government is deeply in the red, with a net worth of minus £124bn when the national debt and other obligations have been deducted from its assets. "It's in a bad position compared to the period up to about 1980," Mr Weale said. "Until then the government owned quite a lot of what were then nationalised industries and had positive net worth. Since then it's been selling them off and borrowing money, with exceptions of relatively short spells, so its debt has risen. "But compared with the periods just after the three big wars - the Napoleonic war and the first and second world wars - it's small relative to the country's income." The statistics also challenge the assumption that investment in industry has declined in recent years. While it was below the rate of depreciation in some sectors, such as mining and agriculture, it was above it overall. The value of manufacturing has remained steady over the last four years, at around £200bn. Elliott Frisby, spokesman for the British Tourist Authority, said the country would be worth every penny of £5 trillion to a prospective buyer. "We've got so many selling points, from our history and heritage to our coastlines," he said. Even our notorious weather should not put off potential buyers, he suggested. "In many ways our climate generates great countryside, very green and varied, from places in the south where palm trees can grow, to moors in the north, to the Scottish highlands. "We've also got fantastic towns and cities. London is renowned as a fashion capital, with some of the world's leading designers, and a lot of people come here for shopping, because of brand names such as Selfridges and even Marmite." Thankfully, none of those bargain hunters will be able to stretch to the hefty pricetag on the UK itself - which equates to around 1.25 trillion large jars of Marmite. Selling Britain by the pound If we sold Britain, this is what we could buy instead: · 92 international
space stations at £54bn each
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