A LUCKY Premium Bond owner in Wirral has just become an overnight millionaire.

National Savings & Investments, which runs the Premium Bond draw, announced tonight that the Wirral jackpot winner - who wants to remain anonymous - has become Ernie’S 254th Premium Bond millionaire.

The winner holds £5,000 worth of the bonds and he bought his jackpot bond in 1996.

Wirral has 113,348 Premium Bonds holdings worth more than £210m.

In total there are more than 690,000 unclaimed Premium Bonds prizes worth more than £39m.

In Wirral, almost 3,000 of Ernie - Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment - prizes worth over £165,000 still remain unclaimed.

A woman from the area who is still due to receive £1,000 after failing to claim her prize in a previous draw. She has only £1 invested in Premium Bonds and the prize was won in January, 1996.

Since 1957, four generations of the Ernie computer have produced the numbers for more than two hundred million tax-free prizes worth around £12 billion.