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Brexit

Brexit spending article in today's Times

5 replies

Orangeblossom78 · 29/01/2020 07:45

I cut and paste this article, the figures are in the link here. Thought it might be of interest.

www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/eu-funding-uk-map-how-much-get-back-5jxlq65zh
Britain has taken back control. On Friday the UK formally ends its membership of the European Union and, with it, its obligation to pay into EU coffers.

The financial cost to Britain of being part of the club in recent years has been about £9 billion, after the benefits of membership are subtracted from our contributions, but the effects are not evenly spread.

A Times analysis of EU funding shows how different regions compare — and therefore where the UK may find funding gaps to plug — and how Britain compares to the rest of the EU.

Ever since Britain joined what was then the European Community in 1973 it has been part of a complex financial system requiring the government to send an annual “cheque” to Brussels only to get some of that money back — labelled with an EU badge.

The central ideal behind the project was one, oddly enough, that Boris Johnson would have sympathy with: Europe was about “levelling up” and EU funding was used to support development in the continent’s least prosperous areas.

But as the EU has expanded to the East, even the least developed parts of the UK have struggled to compete for European money.

As a consequence the amount that Britain “gets back” from Europe has fallen as a percentage of what we put in.

According to official figures, the EU has spent an average of €6-7 billion in the UK every year since 2014. More than 50 per cent was put into “sustainable growth: natural resources”; 20 per cent into “economic, social and territorial cohesion” and another 20 per cent into “competitiveness for growth and jobs”.

This contrasts with annual EU contributions of about £15 billion, making the real “cost” of membership around £9 billion.

So how does this compare with other countries? The UK is the fourth-largest contributor to EU budget behind Germany, France and Italy but it is only the seventh-largest recipient of EU funding. The majority of this goes to UK farmers under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

According to the data collected by myEU.uk, the EU has funded more than 30,000 UK projects since 2008. On average, the EU provided 70 per cent of the total cost of each project, the rest coming from local authorities and local government.

So who has done well out of EU funding? Breaking it down by constituency it appears, by and large, that southern England that has benefited.

But this is somewhat misleading. Many of these areas include universities that benefit from research grants or are constituencies, like Westminster or Cardiff, which contain central government departments that act as gatekeepers for EU funding. If you were to filter those out you would get a rather different picture.

By filtering out just the funding that goes to research, the picture changes.

Overall, from 2008 to 2020:
• 210 constituencies received less than £10 per person
• 276 constituencies received £10 - £100 per person
• 132 constituencies received £100 - £1,000 per person
• 29 constituencies received more than £1,000 per person

So is there any correlation between the amount of money that individual constituencies got from the EU and the decision of voters to back Leave or Remain?

Research suggests that from June 2011 to June 2016:
• Of the 310 constituencies that received less than £10 per person, 75 per cent of them voted Leave
• Of the 236 constituencies that received £10 - £100 per person, 58 per cent of them voted Leave
• Of the 84 constituencies that received £100 - £1,000 per person, 36 per cent of them voted Leave
• Of the 13 constituencies received more than £1,000 per person, only three voted leave: Coventry South (50.4 per cent), Weaver Vale (50.6 per cent) and Neath (54 per cent).

Bucking the trend, however, Scotland voted Remain despite receiving less money from the EU than the rest of the country. So did the area around London.

There are limitations to the data, however. This funding does not include money from the CAP, in many areas the largest source of funding, because data was not available at constituency level.

Now that Britain is leaving we will no longer be sending money to the EU. But the government will have to decide what existing EU funding in the UK to maintain.

There will also be additional costs to departure as the government will have to set up new agencies to do things that are done at a pan-European level such as aviation safety and medical regulation.

Not only that — but in the grand scheme of government spending — £9 billion is not actually a lot of money.

If the economy shrinks and the government’s tax take goes down then that £9 billion saving could disappear overnight.

But that is for the future. Britain has taken back control. The critical question for the years to come will be how the government uses that control and how successful it is in doing so.

OP posts:
Orangeblossom78 · 29/01/2020 07:46

Total spent by EU in the UK vs UK's net contribution to EU
2018
£5.6bn
£8.9bn
2017
£5.4bn
£8.9bn
2016
£6.0bn
£9.6bn
2015
£6.3bn
£10.8bn
2014
£5.9bn
£9.8bn

OP posts:
Orangeblossom78 · 29/01/2020 07:46

Top ten

Countries that received the most EU funds in 2018

Poland
€16.3bn
France
€14.8bn
Spain
€12.3bn
Germany
€12.1bn
Italy
€10.3bn
Belgium
€8.5bn
UK
€6.6bn
Hungary
€6.3bn
Portugal
€5.0bn
Greece
€4.9bn

OP posts:
Orangeblossom78 · 29/01/2020 07:47

Top funded

Constituencies that have received the most EU funding from 2008 to 2020

Top five
Total Funds
Cities of London and Westminster
£1,158m
Cardiff Central
£819m
Cambridge
£784m
Holborn & St Pancras
£781m
Coventry South
£706m
Top five (excluding funding going to research)
Total Funds
Coventry South
£536m
Sheffield Central
£191m
Glasgow Central
£173m
Weaver Vale
£137m
Cardiff South & Penarth

OP posts:
Peregrina · 29/01/2020 14:51

Are they saying 'Whoops', or are they getting their excuses in first?

lljkk · 01/02/2020 14:44

Since EU was first & foremost a 'War Never Again' project, a huge bargain price compared to what could have happened if the Continent had erupted again like it did in late 1930s.

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