Families in the UK are already heaving under the burden of personal debts during the economic slowdown and fearing a hike in taxes after the next General Election expected by June 2010.

Now they may discover that every household in Britain has a more than 85,000 pounds stake in the country's debt and the total amount is three times the amount the Government says the figure is, according to a taxpayers lobby group.

The public deficit stands at 2,200 billion pounds says the Taxpayers' Alliance and does not even include the accumulated debt of decades which countries typically have.

The official Treasury figure of 805 billion pounds does not include the cost of public sector pensions, the "hidden costs" of Labour's Private Finance Initiative contracts, debts incurred by Network Rail and recent bank rescue packages and bank liabilities.

Tory MP Brooks Newmark accused Prime Minister Gordon Brown of covering up the true despair of government finances.

The Treasury, the government's finance ministry, hit back saying it was a decision for the Office for National Statistics what was included in the figure.