If statistics are to be believed, the United Kingdom 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 Daily Telegraph reported on Friday.

The newspaper, referring official Government figures, reported that the sum — £8.1 trillion — has been calculated by experts at the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The figure was calculated based on 2014 year-end data.

‘The total includes the value of all homes in the country, along with all other buildings, machinery, bridges, roads, stock market investments and current account balances’, reported the Gulf News.

‘[If a buyer could be found for the lot, the ONS estimated that each of the UK’s 64.6 million people would receive £125,000, or £302,000 per household, the ONS said.’

‘The £8.1 trillion figure is a large number and it helps to think about it as a sum of money per person or per household,’ the newspaper quoted said Wesley Harris, an ONS statistician.

“Residential property is the biggest and most valuable non-financial 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.”

‘Real estate value was estimated at £5.1 trillion, or more than 60 per cent of the total, up by £3.7 trillion since 1997. The increase in value was due to increase property prices, not an increase in the overall number’, said the Gulf News.

‘However, the financial sector saw a major slump over the same period.’

“The financial corporations sector had an estimated net worth of minus £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.

“Financial corporations are institutional units whose principal activity is the production of financial services and, for example, include banks, building societies and insurance companies.”

Other prices included in the total

‘£1.4 trillion — currency in circulation (which includes money in bank accounts)’

‘£1.9 trillion — buildings and structures including roads, railways, bridges, sports stadia, warehouses and pipelines.

£850 billion — machinery, equipment and weapons systems including all the cars and computers in the land, which were estimated to be worth £850 billion.’

What £8.1 trillion would buy

‘9,761 versions of the Jeddah Tower, the 3,307ft building under construction in Saudi Arabia which will be the world’s tallest building when complete, at a cost of £825 million.’

94,525 transfers of footballer Gareth Bale, at the record fee of £85.3 million from Tottenham Hotspur to Real Madrid in 2014.

‘The most expensive painting of all time, Paul Gaugin’s When Will You Marry?, 40,315 times, based on its February 2015 sale price of £200 million.’

‘The former Neverland ranch near Santa Barbara, California, once owned by the pop star Michael Jackson, could be purchased 122,166 times over, at its May 2015 advertised sale price of £66m.’

‘36.6 million Rolls-Royce Ghost II 4d Auto at the list price of £220,019.’

‘13,438 trillion Mars bars at 60p each.’

‘A totally irrelevant number’

The Forbes magazine, however, denied the statistics.

‘And while that number [£8.1 trillion] is true, given the limitations of how we measure these things, it’s also in reality an entirely irrelevant figure’, the magazine reported.

‘We can check this easily: go look at your house insurance policy. They do not promise to pay you the market value of the place that you live in if it burns down. They promise to pay you the cost of rebuilding it. And anywhere in the South of England that’s a very much lower value than that market one. It’s also not the value of the land that it is built upon. The largest part of this value is in fact the permission you receive from government to be allowed to build a dwelling on that land.’

‘The second way that it’s wrong can be seen by subtracting that property “wealth” from the total number. If that total is £8 trillion, domestic property is £5 trillion then the real capital stock of the economy is £3 trillion. And GDP is the annual return that we get on that capital stock: GDP is around £1.5 trillion so we must therefore be getting a 50% return on our capital stock’, Forbes report added.