The small print of all Treasury documents is where the real ‘nasties’ are always buried! The PBR is no exception.
This deals with our EU contributions which are soaring thanks to Blair AND Sarkozy, but also hidden was an announcement that the UK will follow other major European states in putting €100m (£90m) in to an equity fund to invest in environmentally friendly infrastructure projects! We don’t HAVE money to burn like that any more!
Christina
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TELEGRAPH 10.12.09
Cost of Britain's EU membership to jump by £1.2billion
The cost of Britain’s membership of the European Union will jump by £1.2billion next year, Treasury documents show.
By Christopher Hope, Whitehall Editor
Official figures show Britain’s net contributions to the European Union will jump from £4.8billion in 2009/10 to £6billion in 2010/11.
This means that Britain’s contribution to the Commission will have doubled in just three years from £3billion in 2008/09, according to footnotes in the 216-page pre-Budget report.
Britain is a major net contributor to the EU budget, but UK payments were reduced by an annual rebate, worth £4billion a year, first negotiated by Margaret Thatcher in 1984.
The net EU contributions are rising because of a deal struck in 2005 by Tony Blair - with Gordon Brown’s backing - to a staged series of cuts in the rebate. He was strongly criticised for failing to extract any concessions from Brussels in return.
Campaigners said the increase in 2009/10 [is] because it is the first year when the phasing out of the rebate begins. The part-scrapping of the rebate is “back-end loaded” so that the cost of Britain’s membership will rise substantially.
The rebate to Britain from the EU is worth £5.6billion in 2008/09, £5.1billion in 2009/10, and £3.3billion in 2010/11.
Mats Persson, research director at Open Europe, said: “The increase in the UK’s contribution to the EU budget could hardly come at a worse time.
"The EU budget represents exceptionally poor value for taxpayers’ money – it’s wasteful, irrational and hopelessly out of date.
“British taxpayers have good reason to be angry about their money being spent on wasteful EU projects rather than on closing the budget deficit or lowering taxes at home.”
James Clappison, a Conservative member of the House of Commons’ European scrutiny committee, said: "The Government failed to stand up for our interesst and we have now got a very bad deal that will cost us dear in hard times."
A report last month claimed that Britain will have lost out on €10.5billion (£9.3billion) [Nearly double the PBR’s hike in NI contributions -cs] by not receiving the full rebate between 2007 and 2013. The figure was far higher than the previous estimate, which was £7.2billion between 2007 and 2013.
Research by the House of Commons library showed that the lost income from rebate was the equivalent of £344 for every household in Britain.
Meanwhile, it emerged today that EU staff are planning to strike next week to keep a 3.7 per cent pay rise - which critics are comparing with the pay freeze being experienced by many member states.
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