Brexit: Boris Said £350m to NHS, The Divorce Bill at £40B?

The region of £30bn to £40bn has begun to emerge as the likely cost of the “divorce bill” that the UK will have to pay to leave the European Union.

Brexit Secretary David Davis and his team are still frustrating Brussels by refusing to engage in the nitty-gritty of working out how the bill will be calculated but seasoned observers who understand both London and Brussels.believe a realistic figure would be somewhere around £35bn.

The ironic symmetry is that a bill of £35bn would be 100 times the £350 million sum that Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and other Brexiteers claimed Britain would actually gain every single week from leaving the EU.

The divorce bill will cover items such as the unfunded pension entitlements of EU civil servants that were incurred during Britain’s membership of the club, “contingent liabilities” to cover risks that the EU undertook when Britain was a member and withdrawal costs including the expense of moving EU agencies from Britain.

Other options?

But what does a sum like that actually mean – what else could the UK do with £35bn?

There are 70 flagship general hospitals that could be built for the NHS.

Or 6 million hip operations that could be funded.

There are free meals for 4.7m school pupils for 20 years.

Or 500,000 new social homes that could be built if post-Brexit Britain found the skilled labour to do the work.

Alternatively, £35bn is pretty close to the UK’s entire annual military budget.

Or it could pay for six of the country’s new Queen Elizabeth aircraft carriers.

To put the bill into another military perspective, the cost of UK operations in Iraq between 2003 and 2009 was £9.5bn.

Fixing Transport

Some of London’s massive transport problems could be solved with this sort of money. The divorce bill would cover the £30bn bill of Crossrail2 with a chunk left over to go towards the £17bn cost of a new runway at Heathrow.

According to the costings in the Labour Party’s general election manifesto £35bn would be enough to replace a year’s worth of university tuition fees, restore maintenance grants and fund some of the other promises that Labour claimed would provide “hope for all our citizens.”

If the equivalent of the divorce bill was spent each year it could finance the following:

The extra £6bn needed to provide schools with extra staff, smaller class sizes and protection against losses from the new education funding formula.

The much-need £5.3bn for childcare and early-years care, including more money for Sure Start.

An immediate £5bn for healthcare, including free parking at hospitals and medical facilities but excluding higher pay and capital expenditure.

The £2.1bn needed for additional social care, with £600m put aside to restore nurses bursaries.

Better Pensions

Another £300m for British pensioners living overseas, extending pension credit to those affected by changes to their pension age since the 1995 Pensions Act.

Lifting the social security bill by £4bn to increase Employment Support Allowance for low earners by £30 a week for those in the work-related activity group, scrap the bedroom tax, implement a court ruling increasing access to the Personal Independence Payment for people with long-term health problems or disabilities, restore housing benefits for under-21s, reverse cuts to bereavement support payment, update the carers’ allowance and provide extra funds for the Universal Credit.

Adding £6.1bn under the Barnett formula for increased funding for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Putting £4bn aside to end the public sector pay cap and an extra £300m to recruit and train 10,000 more police officers to work on community beats.

Funding some support mechanisms for small business to cushion the blow of moving to a real living wage of at least £10-an-hour by 2020.

by Bob Graham

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