October 2002

Review of the sale of part of the UK gold reserves

Update on United Kingdom Gold Policy: the Government has no plans to sell holdings of gold from its reserves and will therefore not participate in the renewal of the Agreement on Gold announced by the European Central Banks (Press Notice: 8 March 2004)

On 7th May 1999 the Government announced a restructuring of the UK’s reserve holdings to achieve a better balance in the portfolio by increasing the proportion held in currencies. Since then a total of approximately 395 tonnes of gold has been sold at 17 auctions, run by the Bank of England on the Treasury’s behalf.

Revenue from the auctions, totalling around $3.5 billion, has been reinvested in interest-bearing foreign currency assets and retained within the reserves.

This document reviews the reasons for and aims of this sale and an analysis of the sales programme.

The full report is available below Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF). If you do not have Adobe Acrobat installed on your computer you can download the software free of charge from the Adobe website. For alternative ways to read PDF documents and further information on website accessibility visit the HM Treasury accessibility page.

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PDF file of Review of the sale of part of the UK gold reserves (217KB)