Being a member of the EU costs the UK money, by way of a membership fee, but (arguably) also creates jobs, trade and investment.
According to a UK Parliament research briefing entitled
EU referendum: UK proposals, legal impact of an exit and alternatives to membership,
published on February 12 2016 and held in the House of Commons library
There is no definitive study of the economic impact of the UK’s EU membership or the costs and benefits of withdrawal. Many of the costs and benefits are subjective or intangible and a host of assumptions must be made to reach an estimate.
While the actual economic costs and benefits may be difficult to calculate at least we know what we actually pay for membership, or do we ?
For example, read the explanation found at
which attempts to make some sense from the different sources such as the Treasury, ONS and Europes own data from the European Commission (http://ec.europa.eu/budget/figures/2007-2013/index_en.cfm).
The BBC website also has a breakdown of the UK’s net contribution in 2015
http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/zgjwtyc#zct3wxs
Overall, through these source and others, there appears to be a consensus that the UK’s contribution in 2015, can be broken down as follows:
Amount that we should pay into the EU: £18bn
less the UK rebate 1 : £5bn
less EU payments to the UK: £4.5bn
leaving a net contribution of £8.5bn
Assuming these numbers are accurate lets look at them further
£8.5bn is actually £8,500,000,000
which works out at over 23 million pounds a day
or almost 1 million pounds an hour
(It is also worth mentioning, as a comparison, that total Public Spending in the UK in 2015 totalled around £748 billion so that payments to the EU represent approximately 1% of this figure
http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/spending_chart_2005_2019UKb_F0t).
Update 14/04/2016
In a recently published research briefing
http://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/SN06455
there are details of the UK’s contributions to the EU budget from 2009 to 20015
A copy of the document can be obtained from
http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06455/SN06455.pdf
Update 30/11/2016
still a thorny issue …
Let’s look at figures provided by the EU themselves in the European Commission financial report for 2015
and the full article at
https://politick.co.uk/how-much-does-the-uk-owe-the-eu/
so was the Leave Battlebus actually near the mark ?
Notes:
- The rebate was negotiated by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1984 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_rebate ↩