True cost of UK debt is £86,000 per household, warns MP
By Deborah Hyde
19 October 2009
The Conservative MP for Braintree calculates the true level of government debt is £2,200 billion (or £85,610 per household), equivalent to 157% of GDP.
He said the latest official figure of £805 billion does not take into account:
- the full cost of projects financed through the PFI (£139 billion)
- unfunded public sector pension liabilities (£1,104 billion)
- contingent liabilities such as Network Rail (£22 billion)
- the cost of recent interventions in the financial sector (£130 billion).
These hidden liabilities total £1,395 billion (100% of GDP).
See also:
Government debt ‘nearly three times higher than official figure’
Tom Bawden
October 19, 2009
Employers yesterday called upon the Government to get to grips with its ballooning debts as a new study put the true size of the public sector’s net liabilities at £2,200 billion, almost three times official figures.
The CBI said that the Government needed to cut its planned spending by £120 billion over the next six years, amid forecasts that official figures due tomorrow will show that total net borrowing has surged by another £10 billion in the past month.
The true level of Government debt is equivalent to 157 per cent of national output and nearly three times as large as the £805 billion figure reported by the Office for National Statistics, according to a new book published by a centre-right think tank.
Brooks Newmark, the Conservative MP for Braintree, Essex, says in The Hidden Bombshell, published today by the Centre for Policy Studies, that government debt is actually £2,200 billion. In the book, Mr Newmark argues that the UK’s public sector net debt is equivalent to £85,610 per household and in the last year has risen by £346 billion — or by £11,000 a second.
