£5 trillion value on UK Plc

BRITAIN is worth nearly £5trillion, more than half of it in ordinary houses. The startling total - £4,983,000,000,000 or almost five thousand billion pounds - includes all the buildings, houses, factories, cars, trains, planes, roads, bridges, machinery, businesses, money and investments in the country.

It breaks down as £84,131.08 for each one of the 59,229,000 estimated population of the country last year.

The calculations, by the Government's Office for National Statistics, show the dramatic effects of the 1990s property boom.

In 1994, residential homes were worth just £ 1,206bn and accounted for only 43% of the nation's wealth. By the end of last year the value of houses and flats had more than doubled to £2,744bn - 55% of the total.

Some 6% of homes, worth around £165bn, are public housing belonging to local councils and housing associations. That means that ordinary householders between them own property worth a massive £2,579bn, just over half of the net value of everything in the country.

The ONS said: 'The country's assets are largely in the hands of its citizens.'

It points out that the new 55% level is 'due largely to rising house prices and the increase in housing stock'.

The boom has provided a major boost to the development of Britain as a property-owning democracy, the figures show.

The one cloud on the horizon is that such growth could be wiped out rapidly by another property crash on the lines of the slump of the early 1990s. The analysis is published under the title of Capital Stock, Capital Consumption and Non-Financial Balance Sheets End-2002.

It focuses largely on Britain's tangible assets because the ONS discovered that our levels of debt mean that our financial assets are almost exactly cancelled out by what we owe.

The money balance sheet shows we owe just over £9bn more than we have in liquid assets. 'Our net wealth of £5trillion is tied up in our non-financial assets,' the ONS said.

It includes £565bn worth of commercial and public buildings; and roads, railways, pipelines, airports and other civil engineering works valued at £537bn.

A new category on the list is mobile phone licences, which are valued at £21.9bn - the price phone companies paid for them in 2000.

The report also shows that unlike private citizens, central government has considerably more debt than assets. The Government owes £124bn after the value of its buildings and other holdings is set off against its debts and outgoings. The state has been in deficit since 1993.

Overall, the ONS report said, investment in most industries is higher than depreciation. Manufacturing industry, which regularly complains about facing hard times, has in fact maintained its status and shown investment levels matching depreciation over the past two years.

But farmers, badly hit by foot-andmouth and agricultural red tape, really have suffered, the report showed. Investment in agriculture is now slower than the rate of agricultural depreciation, and the value of farms and farmland has dropped by £100m since 2000.

The ONS said the country's £ 5trillion total 'dwarfs the wealth of any individual on the planet, including Bill Gates'.