Post-Brexit payments to the EU are set to pass £50billion in a “slap in the face” to British taxpayers, new figures show.
Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed the UK gave £3.25billion to Brussels last year.
This takes the total paid to the European Union since Britain officially left in 2020 to approximately £44billion, according to the Government agency.
In addition, the Government has committed to providing at least £8billion more as part of the exit deal.
This means more than £50billion will be paid to the bloc, far exceeding what previous governments claimed they would be willing to pay to exit the bloc.
Critics have called the figure an insult to the many British households already scraping by and potentially facing tax hikes in the budget later this month.
Former Tory Brexit minister David Jones, who defected to Reform UK in July, said: “This is nothing less than a slap in the face to all the hard-working Britons who are currently struggling with a cost-of-living crisis.
“The European Union should no longer be the recipient of funds from this country as far as I’m concerned.
The UK gave £3.25billion to Brussels last year, taking the total already handed over to more than £44billion
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“I think we were so desperate to get out of the EU that at the time we basically came up with a very bad deal.”
Head of the MCC Brussels think-tank Frank Furedi said: “Our negotiators have been taken for a ride and basically had no idea how to play hardball, which is what you need to do.
“As far as they were concerned they just wanted an easy life and they didn’t particularly care about the financial consequences of this.”
He added: “As far as the EU Commission is concerned, they’re laughing all the way to the bank because they got a very good financial deal out of this.
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The Government had committed to paying an additional £8billion under the exit deal
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“It’s a tragedy that we’ve let all this money slide out of our hands and handed it over to the EU.”
Most of the payments made were under the bill which Britain agreed to pay in the Withdrawal Agreement after leaving the union in January 2020.
The settlement was originally thought to be between £35billion to £39billion.
In July 2021, Downing Street rejected an EU estimate of the total bill which came in at £41billion, insisting it would be less.
The majority of the money sent relates to things which the UK already committed to while it was a member of the bloc but had not yet paid for.
Some was paid in the so-called ‘transition period’ between February and December 2020, during which Britain had officially left the bloc but temporarily remained in its single market and customs union.
After this point, a free trade agreement was implemented.
The ONS figures showed that £18.1billion was paid to Brussels in 2020, followed by £5.8billion in 2021, £9.3billion in 2022, £8.2billion in 2023 and £3.25billion last year.
For reference, when the UK was a full member of the EU, its net contribution ranged from £8.9billion in 2017 to £9.4billion in 2019.