callan
Striker
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2006
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Thought I would correct your amount for you as it was wrong.
If you are going to correct something....
From full Fact
The UK pays more into the EU budget than it gets back.
In 2016 the UK government paid £13.1 billion to the EU budget, and EU spending on the UK was forecast to be £4.5 billion. So the UK’s ‘net contribution’ was estimated at about £8.6 billion.
Each year the UK gets an instant discount on its contributions to the EU—the ‘rebate’—worth almost £4 billion last year. Without it the UK would have been liable for £17 billion in contributions.
UK EU membership Fee 2016The UK doesn’t pay or "send to Brussels" this higher figure of £17 billion, or anything equivalent per week or per day. The rebate is applied straight away, so the UK never contributes this much.
The UK’s contributions to the budget vary from year to year. They’ve been larger recently than in previous decades.
UK payments to EU budget since 1973A membership fee isn’t the same as the economic cost or benefit
Being in the EU costs money but does it also create trade, jobs and investment that are worth more?
We can be pretty sure about how much cash we put in, but it’s far harder to be sure about how much, if anything, comes back in economic benefits.
£55 million a day doesn't include the rebate and is not based on recommended figures
The claim that the UK’s membership fee is £55 million a day comes from the £20 billion annual UK payment to EU institutions listed in the Office for National Statistics' (ONS) Pink Book.
The ONS told us this isn’t the correct figure to use. It has another set of figures which actually represent official government payments, although this isn’t clear from the release.
The £20 billion figure includes payments to EU institutions by UK households, and so doesn’t represent what the government pays as a ‘membership fee’.
The Treasury has more up-to-date estimates than the ONS, and uses slightly different accounting methods. They show that the UK government paid in £13.1 billion in 2016.
We previously said that “it's reasonable to describe £55 million as our ‘membership fee’, but it ignores the fact that we get money back as well.”
This was based on the understanding that the rebate is paid up front and then sent back, which we now know is wrong.
£350 million a week doesn’t include the rebate but uses better figures
It’s also been claimed that we send £350 million a week to the EU. That also misses out the rebate, although is based on better figures for the UK’s contributions.
£350 million is what we would pay to the EU budget, without the rebate.
But the UK actually pays just under £250 million a week.
The UK Statistics Authority has said the EU membership fee figure of £19 billion a year, or £350 million a week, is "not an amount of money that the UK pays to the EU each year".