This is what our £2 TRILLION debt would look like piled up in Wembley stadium
BRITAIN owes an absolute pile. Government debt has surged to £2.198 TRILLION thanks to the Covid crisis.
But what does that kind of cash actually look like?
It’s a bigger wedge than any of us will ever get our hands on.
The sum could fund one-and-a-quarter Iraq Wars – or nearly 14 years of NHS spending. It’s £33,000 for every man, woman and child in the UK.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak says he’ll get it down . . . eventually.
Well, best of luck, mate.
Here, we show what £2,198,000,000,000 looks like – in used £50s plonked into Wembley Stadium.
£2,198trillion is the Government forecast for public sector net debt in 2020-21.
It is around 108 per cent of gross domestic product, the worth of everything produced in a year in the UK. It is financed mainly by Government bonds and quantitative easing or “printing money”.
The Government expects to pay around £45billion in debt interest in 2021/22.
- Source: Budget 2021, HM Treasury. Height of money pile based on thickness of used £50 notes at approximately 0.125mm (new notes are 0.113mm thick) and the size of Wembley’s pitch at 105m x 69m.
Things this cash could do
- Build 5,171 hospitals… or fund the NHS for 14 years
- Power every UK home with electricity for 113 years
- Pay everyone’s income tax for 11 years
- Fund 19 years of school, college and university
- Send another 1,156 probes to Mars
- Vaccinate the world against Covid, twice a year, for the next 47 years
- If these notes were a single pile it would be 3,414 miles high
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