Press Release- 8th February 2008

New Global Vision paper finds that millions of taxpayer money being wasted by EU 

Matthew Elliott and Dr Lee Rotherham recently unearthed a staggering £101 billion of government misspending in the UK - all paid for the taxpayer – in The Bumper Book of Government Waste 2008.   Building on their previous research, a new paper for Global Vision investigates one of the major culprits behind the growing mountain of waste – the European Union.  In a highly bureaucratic culture open to abuse, fraud and corruption, Elliott and Rotherham found that:

• The European Parliament recently spent €830,000 replacing filing cabinets to transport documents during the seven hour trek from Brussels to Strasbourg, because the old ones tended to fall over and injure the removal men.  The two-seat European Parliament itself cost an estimated €205 million in 2006.
 
• Shared out evenly between absolutely every EU national, the CAP costs everyone £210 each in payments alone. This, of course, ignores the higher food bills that follow.  And yet the food mountains still exist. The UK still has 13,500 tonnes of cereal, rice, sugar and milk sitting in silos and warehouses, plus 3,500 hectolitres of alcohol including wine. Last year, the UK spent £1.38 million buying up some more or storing its current stock, though we also sold some off.
 
• The Commission spent around €106 million in 2003 on interpreter services, and the European Parliament another €57 million. Auditors found that permanent translators were spending on average 33 days on ‘implicit stand-by duty’ – i.e. physically present at the building but not actually needed for anything. A high proportion of these days – 130 interpreters a day, or a quarter of the staff interpreters – occur in the slow month of August. As a result, about 15,000 interpreter days, corresponding to about 15% of the workforce’s working days, weren’t used. Even the temporary staff, or ACIs, were sitting around unused for a total of 6,000 days. Since each day costs an average of €865, that meant a waste of €18 million on having interpreters drinking espressos. 6,300 half-days were lost when interpreters were booked but not told in time by MEPs or officials that they weren’t needed – about 8% of total interpreter use, or €6 million in costs at the European Parliament alone.
 
• The Commission miscalculated the asset value of its buildings by €188 million, the total lease liabilities by €254 million, and the accumulated depreciation value by €23 million.  Furthermore, at the close of 2004, the EU’s pensions liabilities were estimated at an astounding €26 billion.
 
 
Dr Rotherham states:
 
“The shameful thing about EU waste is no longer the extent of it. It’s that we have become used to it. The shocking thing is that we are not longer shocked.
 
“Perhaps MPs currently debating on giving the EU new powers through the Lisbon Treaty should stop, and instead concentrate on fixing what’s already gone wrong. ”