Costly

The avoidable cost of being in the EU is £873 per person per year. When UKIP comes to power, this cost will cease.

 

Calculation of the £873

We have based our figures on Lord Pearson’s “What is the point of the EU?” The total annual cost of being in the EU is £40 billion, to which must be added the waste on capital projects of £94 billion, which, spread over say 10 years, gives another £9.4 billion per year. Taking into account that the UK’s population is 56,000,000, we arrive at a cost per family per year of £873 being = ((£40bn + £9.4bn) / (56,000,000)

Extract from "What is the point of the European Union?" by Lord Pearson of Rannoch, a Tory peer.

October 2001

D. How much does EU membership cost us in cash?9 The Government steadfastly refuses to carry out any sort of cost-benefit analysis, although my friends and I in the Lords have made several attempts to force it to do so (see our debates 27th June 2003 and 11th February 2004). Ministers merely insist that the benefits of our EU membership are so obvious and wonderful that any analysis would be a waste of time and money. Presumably the Government doesn't want the following sort of figures to see the light of day.

D(i) Annual Costs: If we start by looking at annual expenditure, we very easily reach an annual waste of some £40 billion pounds a year. A billion pounds, one thousand million pounds, is a rather confusing figure and most people don't stop to think what it means. Well, one thousand million pounds builds, equips and staffs a decent district hospital to run indefinitely. You build and equip it for £80 - £100 million and then you have a fund of £900 million to run it. So perhaps we should measure our Euro-waste in district hospitals rather than billions, but I'll go back to billions for now. According to the Trade Justice Movement, supported by CAFOD and Oxfam, the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) costs each family of 4 in the UK about £20 a week, or a fiver a head. Half of this is incurred through higher food costs (against what we would pay for the same food on the open world market) and half through the higher taxes we pay to keep EU farmers in the style to which they have become accustomed. The higher food costs work out at approximately 5p on a pint of milk, 40p on a 60p bag of sugars and 3p on a loaf of bread. So these costs hit the poorest in our society hardest and total about £15.6 billion every year. The EU's charming policy of dumping its unwanted excess produce on the developing world also starves millions to death, mostly children, because local farmers can’t sell their produce in local markets. The Dutch Government has calculated that EU over-regulation costs the Dutch economy some 2% of their Gross Domestic Product annually. 10 It is fair to assume that EU over-regulation doesn't cost the UK economy any less than it costs the Dutch, given Whitehall's well-known practice of ‘gold-plating’ EU legislation. Our GDP is around £1,000 billion, and so 2% of that would come to £20 billion annually. Then there's the hard cash we hand over to Brussels every year. Over the last 10 years we have given Brussels an average of £11 billion per annum to help them finance the whole vast swindle. Of this they have been good enough to send back to us an average of some t7 billion annually, always for projects here which are designed to enhance their wretched image (including the CAP) so that leaves £4 billion straight cash outflow per annum. 11 There are lots of other areas which could be thrown into this calculations such as at least one £billion p.a. for the destruction of our fishing industry, and another billion for the ruin of our modern art market, and so On. But just sticking to the figures I have mentioned, we have a comfortable 40 district hospitals chucked away every year. Let's examine that figures £40 billion per annum, a little further, shall we? It comes to £110 million a day, £5 million per hour, or £666 per annum for each one of us. It is 10 times our railways budget, which Heaven knows could do with a bit of a boost. It is 3 times our whole transport budget. It is two-thirds of our education budget? and it is 10 district hospitals per annum more than our entire defence budget which weighs in at a mere £27 billion per annum 12. So that's a conservative estimate of how much our EU membership is costing us in cash each year: £40 billion. What about some of the longer-term projects which we pay for, courtesy of the Martians in Brussels?

D (ii) Capital Projects The last time the Government dared to answer my Written Questions in the Lords, some 3 years ago, we had already spent £48 billion on the pointless water directives - there was nothing wrong with our water before. Then there's £18 billion so far on the outdated Euro-fighter; £8 billion on the foot and mouth saga (which was directed from Brussels); another £8 billion for removing the harmless kind of asbestos from our buildings; £6 billion for “Reach” the new chemical analysis Directive, and yet another £6 billion for the Waste Electrical and Equipment Directive, which is starting to cause dumping in the countryside. I could go on, but that's another 94 district hospitals so far.

Footnotes 9. And see groundbreaking new study “A Cost Too Far?” by Ian Milne, July 2004, published by Civitas www.civitas.org.uk ISBN 1-903 386-37 3. 10. Speech by Dutch Vice Prime Minister and Finance Minister, Mr. Gerrit Zalm, to the UK governent-sponsored conference “Advancing Enterprise: Britain in a Global Economy", 26th January 2004. 11. UK Balance of Payments: The Pink Book 2003, Office for National Statistics www.statistics.gov.uk. 12. HM Treasury, Budget Statement, 17th March 2004, HC 301. www.hm-treasury.gov.uk.

NB For detailed bullet point analysis of the above, supported by official figures and impeccable sources, see also the Briefing Notes and other material on www.globalbritain.org

 

Noakes

David Noakes writes August 2006 on his website: "The Better Regulation Commission Annual Report, signed by Tony Blair, says the annual cost of implementing EU regulations alone is now 100 billion a year, or nearly 10% of our economy."