Stock market highs help super-rich boost their fortunes

The threshold required to become one of the 1,000 richest people based in Britain hit £100m in 2015, as record highs on global stock markets boosted the fortunes of the world's super-wealthy.

The UK's wealthiest 1,000 people are now collectively worth £547bn - an increase of 112 per cent from £258bn in 2009 during the depths of the financial crisis, according to the Sunday Times Rich List.

A minimum of £100m is now the entry point into the Rich List ranking, £15m more than last year's entry point of £85m as the FTSE 100, S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average all hit fresh highs in the past 12 months. In 1997 it took a fortune of just £15m to join Britain's richest 1,000 people.

The Queen, who topped the first list in 1989, has dropped out of the top 300 for the first time.

Primarily due to the inflow of foreign money, there are 117 billionaires in the 2015 list, up from 104 in 2014. They have a combined wealth of £325bn, with 80 of them based in London. The capital's nearest European rival, Paris, has a quarter of that figure.

The UK capital now has more sterling billionaires than any other city in the world, ahead of New York with 56, San Francisco with 49, Moscow with 45 and Hong Kong with 43.

The wealth gap between the capital and the rest of the UK continues to widen. Less than half of the billionaires listed are based outside London and their collective wealth is £67bn - £191bn less than the London total of £258bn.

Len Blavatnik, the Ukrainian-born owner of Warner Music, is Britain's richest man with a £13.17bn fortune, taking the top spot from brothers Sri and Gopi Hinduja, now worth £13bn.

Mr Blavatnik, whose investments stretch from metals and oil to music publishing and digital media, has a £41m home in London and has donated £75m to Oxford university to found the Blavatnik School of Government. His personal fortune has risen £3.17bn in the past 12 months.

The highest climbers in wealth terms are the Weston family, headed by Galen and George Weston, who run both Selfridges and Primark in the UK, and Penneys and Brown Thomas in Ireland. Their fortune has grown by £3.7bn - more than 50 per cent in a year - to £11bn.

Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich comes in at number 10 on the list with a fortune of £7.29bn, slipping £1.23bn compared with 2014, while Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson has seen his wealth rise from £3.6bn to £4.1bn, making him the 20th-richest person in Britain.

While the rich have more than doubled their wealth since 2009 according to the list, living standards for the average Briton earning £25,000 annually are only just back to what they were before the crash.

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