Britain lost £4.79 billion, or around £192 per household after Gordon Brown sold off 395 tonnes of gold from the United Kingdom’s reserve holdings when he was still Chancellor of the Exchequer, a new report has revealed.

A study conducted by the Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA) said that the sale of the gold, conducted between January 1999 and July 2002 raised around $3.49 billion (£2.16 billion) which was then reinvested in interest-bearing foreign currency assets.

“Since the gold sale, the gold price has risen from around $275 per ounce to nearly $1,120 per ounce,” the TPA report said.

“At that price, the gold that was sold would now be worth around £8.71 billion. That means the foregone nominal increase in the value of the gold sold is around £6.56 billion,” the report continued, pointing out that the loss as not as complete because the investments would have generated some returns.

The total loss to the Treasury would “only” amount to some £4.79 billion, the report said.

A TPA analysis which compared the return on the actual investment in interest-bearing foreign currency assets with the value of the gold, produced the following calculation:

Total value of Treasury investments was $6,380,784,875. The potential value of gold sold was $14,161,262,512, which means that the amount lost was $7,780,477,637. Once the investment returns were added in, the “real” amount lost to the public purse was £4,787,327,890, the TPA said.

Matthew Sinclair, Research Director at the TPA, wrote in the report that when Mr Brown was at the Treasury, he “sold billions of pounds worth of our gold reserves at the very bottom of the market.

“Taxpayers have lost out on billions that are sorely needed as they face paying the price for his other mistake of pursing a profligate spending policy, mistaking a temporary boom for a permanent improvement in our economic fortunes,” Mr Sinclair said.

“It is clear that the Prime Minister’s management of the nation’s finances was disastrous.”