EU's demands for £bns more of UK money just keep on growing

Update on UK paying for EU pensions – projected cost to UK is now £2.6bn higher

A Facts4EU.Org Sunday update and summary of the problems with the EU’s “divorce bill”

On Friday we published a report showing the enormous share of the EU’s pension and employee benefits to be paid by the UK to the EU for the next 44 years. This is as a result of the EU’s Withdrawal Agreement, agreed by Theresa May, and signed by the current Prime Minister in January last year.

Regrettably the situation for UK taxpayers and the public is even worse than we first reported, as we suggested it would be on Friday. The OBR did not update its annual payments table in its usual Spring report in 2020 and so we used their 2018 Spring publication as the basis for our Friday report. We now know that the total has increased by £2.6bn to £12bn.

Brexit Facts4EU.Org Summary

UPDATE: £12 BILLION OF UK PUBLIC MONEY

Total pensions and employee benefits bill to be paid by the UK : £12 BILLION
This has risen by £2.6bn in only two years
The UK will be part-paying the pensions and employee benefits of all EU staff, not just British staff
Belgians form the biggest nationality group

44 more years of continued UK payments to the EU - for this and for other EU funds
Each year it’s the EU that will tell the UK what it owes for the previous year

We always use conservative figures

This vindicates what we originally wrote, that: “… these figures were calculated in 2018. We now know that the European Commission’s financial accounts for 2019 showed a €17.2bn increase in the net liabilities of its pension scheme.” We then calculated the UK’s share of the EU’s increase on a pro-rata basis.

We always try to estimate conservatively when exact official figures are difficult to come by. In this case we only had total figures from the Commission and not the OBR. The true figure issued late last year is even higher.

UK is now estimated to pay the EU £12bn for EU pension & employee benefits to 2064

Since our report on Friday we have seen many people on social media saying that they don’t believe our facts, or that this amount is for UK employees of the EU and it is therefore reasonable for the British public to pay.

Isn't this only for British employees of the EU?

This is NOT the case.

As we made clear in Friday’s article, the UK is paying for a share of the EU’s TOTAL pension and employee benefits pot, NOT the amount purely for UK employees of the EU.

In Friday’s headlines we used the figure of £10bn as a minimum. That alone was bad enough. We are now able to update that figure to £12bn, using official sources. All we can say is that if readers thought that £10bn was bad enough, it is in fact 20% worse than that.

No-one knows how big the overall EU ‘divorce bill’ will be

This £2.6bn increase in payments for the EU’s pensions and employee benefits highlights the problem with the EU’s ‘divorce bill’ as a whole. No-one knows what the final total will be – we can only estimate.

It is the EU which gives the UK information on what must be settled, and these numbers will appear from them for decades to come. This could still be happening in 2064 – forty years from now.

You will never be told the UK’s total payments to the EU

We confidently predict that the British people will never be told the overall total of payments from the UK to the EU from the time the majority voted to leave, in 2016. Nor indeed since the UK first joined what was then the EEC, in 1973. One of the many reasons why we believe this to be the case is that the official figures for net annual contributions have only ever included payments to the official EU annual budgets.

Facts4EU.Org has previously reported many times on the EU’s “off-budget” funds which the UK has contributed to – and which the UK will continue to do for up to another 10 years. We refer to these payments as “off-the-books”, because from the public’s point of view this is what they are. They do not appear in the official tables of the UK’s net contributions. Below are some of these “off-the-books” EU funds.

Brexit Facts4EU.Org Summary

Payments by the UK into the EU's 'off-budget' funds

Continuing payments to EU's €30bn ‘off-the-books’ EDF fund
Continuing payments to EU's €6bn ‘off-the-books’ Turkey fund
Continuing payments to EU's €3bn ‘off-the-books’ Africa fund
Continuing payments to various EU programmes, eg Horizon2020
Continuing payments for UK involvement in EU defence programmes

Following years of us campaigning on this subject, these ‘off-budget’ funds are now mentioned by civil servants in official reports, but the sums involved are still never included in any of the overall totals of net contributions to the EU.

Bodies such as the OBR and HM Treasury get around this by including these payments under other headings. For example, some of these payments appear as part of ‘foreign aid’.

Observations

Wouldn't you love to know the truth?

We believe that millions of people would like to know exactly how much the EU has been costing us – and will continue to cost us for the next forty years. This is not an unreasonable request, in our view.

We can tell readers from five years of experience, working seven days-a-week for long hours, that it is immensely difficult to find the level of information required to present a full picture from official sources to the British people – on almost any matter related to the UK’s EU membership. We believe that our task has deliberately been made difficult by the Remainer civil servants who work on such things, although we have no hard evidence to back this up.

If Facts4EU.Org is able to keep going as a team, (a very big 'if'), one job we would like to complete is the fullest-possible presentation of the overall costs of EU membership – up to 31 December 2020, together with an accurate overall estimate for the decades following. We think the public have a right to know.

Unfortunately it may not be pretty

One thing we can guarantee: the numbers will be much worse than those which have so far been presented to the public so far. If anyone doubts this, just look at the payments to the EU which have not been included under ‘UK net contributions to the EU’ each year.

Or just look at the £2.6bn increase in UK payments for one specific area – EU pensions and employee benefits – which we have highlighted above. This increase happened in just two years before the UK had even (technically and in name only) left. Imagine what will happen over the period of the next forty years, unless a tight grip is exerted?

A firm hand in government, combined with the publication of far more accurate figures for the amount the UK will pay to the EU, would undoubtedly save the country billions. At a time like this, wouldn’t that be a worthwhile cause for readers to back?

Can we and should we carry on?

We are struggling and we need your help. We have far more to do in researching, publishing, campaigning and lobbying Parliament than we have in terms of the financial resources to fulfil these tasks. We rely 100% on public donations from readers like you. Unlike the Remain/Rejoin camp, we do not have foreign billionaires to subsidise our work.

Covid measures have hit many people's incomes. The whole Covid thing has certainly hit the level of donations we receive, which were already less than we needed to survive. We are most grateful to readers who have donated in recent days, but we badly need more readers to do the same. 10 readers donating £500 per month, or 50 readers donating £100 per month, or 1000 readers donating £5 per month - on top of the one-off donations and monthly donations we currently receive, this would just about keep us going.

If you believe in a fully-free, independent, and sovereign United Kingdom, please make a donation now. It’s quick, secure, and confidential, and you can use one of the links below or you can use our Donations page here. You will receive a personal, friendly ‘thank you’ from a member of our team within 24 hours. Thank you so much if you can help to keep us going in these critical months ahead.

[ Sources: Office for Budget Responsibility | Withdrawal Agreement ] Politicians and journalists can contact us for details, as ever.

Brexit Facts4EU.Org, Sun 10 Jan 2021

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Reader Comments 20

11. Pauline Mckee , Sunday, January 10, 2021, 12:21:

Cancel the WA agreement and the Northern Ireland protocol then we will have the Brexit that the people voted for.

12. Derek Lund , Sunday, January 10, 2021, 14:49:

Now that we've seen the names of just a few of the British people who will benefit from their EU pension we can begin to understand their motives in fighting so long and hard to overturn the referendum result. They needn't have bothered because our push over government is going to pay their their pensions anyway.
Sadly, the rash spending commitments of our government on EU pensions are entirely consistent with their behaviour over other financial commitments. Everything is on the never never whether it be new schools (think PFI) or public sector pensions. Readers of this site may find the prospect of £12 billion strung out over the next 44 years to be appalling (and truly it is) but, when compared with the discounted net present value liability as at 31 March 2019 of £1.89 TRILLION** in respect of public sector pensions, it's a drop in the ocean. Everyone seems to get excited about public sector net debt but that figure as at 31 March 2019 came in slightly less at £1.77 trillion**
-
**source Whole of Government Accounts year ended 31 March 2019 published July 2020. Incidentally, if this were a limited company they would have been fined for late filing!!

13. Pacer Burton , Sunday, January 10, 2021, 19:11:

Tear up the wa and just simply walk away. Boris

14. Glencoe , Sunday, January 10, 2021, 19:16:

Enough is enough. Time to default, what can the EU do about it. After all we will remain Treasure Island to them forever

15. Kath Wheeler , Sunday, January 10, 2021, 21:38:

Tell the Eu to get stuffed we have left and will not be paying for their pensions

16. Barbara Jell , Monday, January 11, 2021, 01:07:

10 - James - Not only is Covid a Globalist scam, it is "The Greatest Hoax ever perpetrated on an Unsuspecting Public" says top Pathologist Dr Roger Hodkinson and has been fuelled by MSM hysteria and a PCR test which is SO unreliable that High Court in Portugal has ruled it UNLAWFUL to quarantine anyone based on the results of these tests. You have been lied to from the outset, with deaths from other causes being falsely attributed to Covid, (including a motor bike accident); you still ARE being lied to! The end game is to coerce everyone into taking an experimental vaccine which has never been tested on humans and which is already causing injuries and death worldwide. Do your homework!

17. Victor Mcclure , Monday, January 11, 2021, 06:36:

BORIS would never give into a no deal. He would rather keep giving the EU money for nothing because these are his friends which he keeps reminding us

18. nudrev breac , Monday, January 11, 2021, 21:45:

WHY do you think the EU DICTATOR BARNIER et al fort to keep the BRITS IN THE EU DICTATORSHIP? MONEY! A few months after TRAITOR HEATH signed the BRITS into the EEC, their contributions doubled so that they became the second highest contrributors to the block and stayed that way for the 47 years they were in. SHOULD HAVE had a hard brexit in 2016.

19. Diane , Tuesday, January 12, 2021, 11:53:

The so called deal of course has not yet been signed off by the EU Parliament and if we are to believe comments in the media, there is, one might suggest, ' mild threat ' that some member states may wish to " improve " it before doing so but of course we'll only hear about that after February 23rd. From our side, let us hope that there are no attempts to introduce closer alignment by stealth. Putting aside the issue of ham & cheese sandwiches and the ongoing violation of our borders by persons unknown, Watchful is the word !

20. Shaun , Wednesday, January 13, 2021, 11:52:

This is one of the reasons why we needed a clean break from the EU. Like I've said we haven't left the EU, we've just renegotiated our terms of remaining in the EU! The UK needs to keep all of its money raised by taxes in the UK. The Lib/Lab/Con have failed to work for the people of the UK for decades. They work only for their precious EU, their NWO and the oppression of the people. Check out https://5dd.uk/ for an alternative to this unrepresentative system.

20 comments, page 2 of 2

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