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How Much Actual Cash is the £44 Billion Brexit Bill?

Posted: 2nd January 2018 by
Richard Rossington
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According to reports, the ‘ridiculous’ bill the UK is to pay out in order to exit the UK, otherwise known as the Brexit bill, stands at around £44 billion. That’s a lot of money, and a lot of cash, but how much cash to be exact?

Finance Monthly has worked out approximately, based on the average size of a £50 bank note, the largest readily available note in the UK, how much space £44 billion in cash takes up? We don’t really have a photo of £44 billion in cash, so we’ll have to try and compare it to something just as big. Is it the size of a football field? The size of the Louvre? The size of the moon?

Well, a classic £50 measures at 156mm x 85mm x 0.113mm and weighs about 1.1g. That’s 1,498.38 mm3 per note. There are 20 million £50s in £1 billion. 20 million £50 notes take up 29,967,600,000 mm3, therefore 29.9676 m3. The Brexit cash is 44 times that figure. This brings us to 1,318.5744 m3, which rounded up is 1,318.6 m3.

Focusing on London, the capital of British finance, Big Ben is officially marked at around 4,650 m3 for its interior. Therefore realistically, the Brexit bill cash could fill up the inside of Big Ben just over a quarter of the way up! At this point it would likely also fill the floor in the House of Commons.

It’s a stack load of cash to hand over, 10 double decker buses’ worth in fact, in terms of volume that is, not value. A London Routemaster double decker bus is worth around £349,500, so 10 of those is £3,495,000 and well, Brexit is going to cost us a little more than that.

Of course, this is all speculation, and even the figure of £44 billion is an unconfirmed unofficial number. None the less, the prospect of paying the European Union such an amount means that as Brexit has all in all been a sizeable decision from the British public, there will be a sizeable price to pay.

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