• Swindon & Wiltshire News
• Friday May 20 2022
• Author Name: Peter Davison

James Dyson tops Sunday Times South West rich list and comes second in UK

Entrepreneur Sir James Dyson is the wealthiest person in the South West and the second richest in the UK, according to the new edition of The Sunday Times Rich List, published today online at thesundaytimes.co.uk/richlist and in the print edition of the newspaper on Sunday.

With a family fortune of £23 billion, up £6.7 billion in 2021, the founder of Malmesbury-based manufacturing and engineering firm Dyson was pipped to the post by London-based brothers Sri and Gopi Hinduja and family, now worth a record £28.472 billion, up £11.472 billion on last year.

Dyson Group had a record year in 2021 with profits of £1.5 billion on sales of more than £6 billion – raising its value from £14.5 billion to £21 billion.

Belfast-born Stephen Fitzpatrick, 44, becomes the South West’s ninth billionaire, worth £1.34 billion. He boosted his personal wealth by £665 million after the New York float of his Bristol-based flying taxi venture Vertical Aerospace.

Fitzpatrick’s wealth includes a £603 million stake in Ovo Energy, also based in Bristol.

But there was less good news for the founders of Bristol-based financial services company Hargreaves Lansdown. The wealth of Peter Hargreaves – who was reportedly the second biggest financial backer of Brexit – is down £342 million to just over £2 billion, while the wealth of co-founder Steve Lansdown – who owns Bristol City football club and the city’s rugby union club, Bristol Bears, is down £128 million to £1.237 billion.

The 68-page special edition of The Sunday Times Magazine reveals the wealth of the 250 richest people in Britain in its 34th annual edition.

There are 177 billionaires in the UK recorded this year, up six from 2021, a year-on-year increase that is also a record.

The combined wealth of the UK billionaires is £653.122 billion, up £55.853 billion, or 9.4 per cent, on the total wealth of the billionaires in last year’s Rich List.

Image courtesy of The Royal Society, reproduced under Creative Commons licence