I've written the Sunday Times Rich List for 10 years - here's what I've learnt about wealth and happiness
The man who has spent a decade keeping track of the fortunes of the UK’s richest people says the process has confirmed his view that money doesn’t buy you happiness.
Robert Watts has been compiling the Sunday Times Rich List since 2016 and says the process of verifying wealth through a combination of analysing publicly-available documents and direct conversations with those on the list and their representatives is a full-time job.
When asked by The Yorkshire Post what he has learnt about the super rich from the experience, he said: “I never thought money made you happy, but I'm more certain of that now than ever before.
“I think it's easy to look at the super rich and think, ‘Wow, they must be having fantastic times jumping from super yacht to super yacht.
“But a lot of these people don’t seem enormously happy. When you think about it, the more you have, the more you have to lose.
“That's an anxiety of people, particularly who come from very humble backgrounds. You wonder if they're in charge of their wealth, or their wealth is in charge of them.
“They're working phenomenal hours each week, and they feel almost the burden of it.
“They have to keep going and they sort of get sucked into it.
“Often I find the wealthy have more problematic, more difficult, relationships with their children. We've got a really good feature in the Sunday Times this weekend about a lady who's called the ‘Nepo Baby Whisperer’. She is someone who helps mentor the children of the super rich because a lot of them do struggle to find meaning and their own identity, and often feel compelled to go into work for a family business that they have no emotional connection to and in fact may be revolted by.”
But he said there are many positive stories as it becomes easier for people to build successful businesses without having money behind them.
“One of the most inspiring things about our Young Rich List of under 40s is that there are guys who built incredibly-successful businesses by starting out with little more than a laptop, a phone and a good idea.
“The days when you needed enormous starting capital, an office and the backing of a banker to help you seem to be gone.
“We've got more and more of these young entrepreneurs, who are doing incredible things.
“There are lots of non-graduates, people who struggled at school. The list is increasingly diverse.
“I suppose it does tell us quite a lot about modern Britain.”
How the Sunday Times Rich List is compiled
The Sunday Times Rich List started back in 1989 and prior to Mr Watts was compiled by Philip Beresford, who had previously been an expert in mapping IRA networks.
Mr Watts said: “He went from covering some of the hardest terrorists to track in the world to covering the super rich. I don't have that academic pedigree, but I've built on his work.”
The pair work together “hand in glove” on the 2016 Rich List before Mr Beresford retired and Mr Watts took over.
He said: “There is a team of brilliant editors and social media whizzes and great picture researchers, but in terms of the cold, hard valuations, that's me. So I've been doing this for 10 years, but I'm really a pup, really, to be honest, because Philip did it for 28 years.”
Mr Watts explains: “There's a massive database which underpins a lot of this with 8,000 high net worth individuals.
“It is a full time job in terms of maintaining and tracking this wealth and then everything. A lot of these businesses have stretched back 200 or 300 years, but you have got to keep an eye on an AI business in Shoreditch that's just been sold for a £1bn.
“It's diverse and changing, and even in my time, the one of the big changes has been old, inherited wealth dropping out of a list to be replaced by new money and self-made entrepreneurs, not unlike Christopher Harborne.”
He adds that careful verification is required.
“The majority of what I do is spending my life trawling through accounts filed with Companies House, shareholdings in public companies, Land Registry documents.
“But also, crucially, about between a third and a half of the people on the Sunday Times Rich List talk to us, and part of that because we've been doing what we do a very, very long time.
“People see the Sunday Times Rich List as something of a matter of public record. They want those numbers to be not a complete surprise to them, and sometimes they're proud about what they've achieved, and they want to feel they want to share it.
“Now, we have to be really, really careful as journalists that we're not being spun or misled, because for all the years that this has been done, there have been people trying to talk their way onto the Sunday Times Rich List, off it, up it, down it, the lot. That has not changed.
“So we look at identifiable wealth. The majority of the data in this list, anyone – if you’ve got a very high boredom threshold – could find.
“But a lot of the stuff on top is where people are having conversations with us and sharing stuff that is otherwise not in the public domain.”
He added: “A lot of it we can corroborate with the help of secondary sources. Sometimes we will ask for effectively an affidavit from a financial advisor or a lawyer to vouch that someone is worth what they say are.
“But the majority of what we're talking about here is information valuations based on audited public audited financial accounts filed with Companies House or identifiable shareholdings from trawling through a register for a public company where you can see it.”