The Size of the UK Government Estate

Yesterday the government released data about the size of the central civil estate. The infographic shows this (green box) compared to well-known geographic features in Britain. The government press release stated that the data are a snapshot of the estate and shows that at 1 September 2011:

• the estate covered by this data is 16, 411, 676 sq m – almost six times the City of London. This does not include the wider public sector estate or parts of Central Government’s operational estate – such as NHS buildings or schools;
• this is spread across 13,911 different property holdings;
• almost one fifth of the estate is in London (17.4%);
• 40% of the estate is office space, the estate also includes 40 laboratories and 18 museums; and
• there are 552 vacant property holdings – where possible, these will be marketed and either sub-let or sold, generating income for taxpayers.

To add some more stats it works out at 180 times larger than the O2 Arena, 4.5 times smaller than Loch Lomond and 23 times smaller than the Isle of Wight. So there we are…