esure home insurance warning from

British households have £3.1 billion of unused and uninsured gadgets, according to new figures.

Over 70 per cent of the population has spent an average of £73.85 on "labour saving" devices - which are currently doing little more than gathering dust.

Residents of the UK have spent £450 million on foot-spas, at around £50 a go and £431 million on bread makers.

Forty per cent of the population refuse to get rid of unused items including electric knives and fondue sets. The sandwich toaster is the item most commonly owned (43 per cent of the population) and rarely used.

And last season's latest "must have" gadget is an item often omitted from household insurance policies, the people who commissioned the poll have said.

Nikki Sellers, a spokesperson from esure, commented: "It is easy to quantify all the things we love in our home and equally as easy to forget the value of dust-gathering gadgets and objects that we never use."

"The popularity of internet shopping and browsing has probably played a large part in tempting people to purchase so-called labour-saving devices that unfortunately do not turn out to be as useful as originally thought," she added.

The poll was carried out by ICM on behalf of esure home insurance - it surveyed more than 1,000 people.