Thursday 06 August 2026 11:01 am
| Updated:
Thursday 06 August 2026 11:22 am
Britain’s national debt has reached £3 trillion. We can’t go on like this, says Anne StricklandAndy Burnham has been Prime Minister for just over a fortnight and in that time, Britain’s national debt crossed the unimaginable £3 trillion mark, according to the Taxpayers’ Alliance Debt Clock. It took us 11 years to go from £1 trillion in debt to £2 trillion in the 2010s, but it has only taken us six years to ratchet that up another trillion. If you spread that burden across every household in the country, it would mean over £100,000 per household of national debt, and that’s before you even get to unfunded public sector pension liabilities and the rest of what the government owes but keeps off its main books. Factor those in and the real national debt is likely to be much, much higher.But what should worry you about this £3 trillion debt is what it costs taxpayers every year just to service. Debt interest hit £109.3bn in 2025-26, the fourth-highest year on record in real terms, and every one of the four highest years we’ve ever recorded has happened since 2022-23. That’s 2.4 times the 70-year average. More than £1 in every £12 that the government spends now goes purely on paying the interest on our debt.
