Britain to Pay Extra £100m a Year to EU

An independent forecaster has said Britain’s contributions to the EU coffers will rise by £100m a year for the next five years, The Telegraph reports.

The Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) has said the country will pay an extra half a billion pounds this year, making the total EU contribution £11 billion.

But Mr Osborne was vindicated over claims he halved the ‘top up bill’ the UK was charged by the Commission after the economy performed better than anticipated.

It still means that Britain will have to fork out an extra £900 million while countries including France and Germany get generous rebates.

The amount forecast for 2015-16 has been cut by £800 million to £9.9 billion, and increased by almost £1 billion for 2016.

The net total works out at £100million a year until 2019 following the controversial recalculation which punished Britain for its economic success.

And the latest bill comes on top of a previous upward revision by the OBR of £800million for 2014-15.

But the OBR warned that the calculations were not finite given ever changing economies and the volatile situation in eurozone countries.

Bizarrely, the Chancellor claimed that Britain would get better value out of the EU despite the huge increases in net contributions which this year stand at £9.1 billion.

“Our task is made easier by the deal we secured for this country when we got the European Union budget cut,” he said.

“Some people claimed that our payments to the European Union would go up this year,” referring to the initial £1.7bn demand after the latest European Council.

“Instead I can confirm that the OBR’s forecast today shows Britain’s net payments to the EU falling by around £1 billion for this year and next year – and falling in real terms over the next 5 years.

“That is the dividend we receive thanks to a Prime Minister who fights hard for our national financial interest in Brussels.”

Matthew Elliott of Business for Britain warned that while the Prime Minister did secure a freeze in the overall budget of the EU, there will be “attempts from the Commission and Parliament to increase the EU budget” which “will continue to be huge upwards pressure on Britain’s EU contributions.”

MEPs vote later this month on the EU budget in Strasbourg and are expected to resist calls by national governments to reign in spending.