We look at why the foreign secretary has restated the discredited claim used by the leave campaign during the referendum

What is the £350m row about?

In his 4,200-word essay on the “glorious” future awaiting Britain after Brexit “succeeds mightily”, the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, wrote:

Once we have settled our accounts, we will take back control of roughly £350m a week. It would be a fine thing, as a lot of us have said, if a lot of that money went on the NHS.

The comment references, but does not directly repeat, the controversial claims by Vote Leave before the referendum that Britain “sends £350m a week to Brussels” and that after Brexit, the government would be able to “fund our NHS instead”.

The claims were largely disproved before the June 2016 vote, with organisations including the independent fact-checkers FullFacts, the BBC and the Guardian all pointing out that the first was simply wrong, and the second highly misleading.

What was wrong with the original claims?

The claim that Britain “sends the EU £350m a week” is wrong because:

The rebate negotiated by Margaret Thatcher is removed before anything is paid to Brussels. In 2014, this meant Britain actually “sent” £276m a week to Brussels; in 2016, the figure was £252m.

Slightly less than half that sum – the money that Britain does send to the EU – either comes back to the UK to be spent mainly on agriculture, regional aid, research and community projects, or gets counted towards the country’s international aid target.

Regardless of how much the UK “saves” by leaving the EU, the claim that a future government would be able to spend it on the NHS is highly misleading because:

It assumes the government would choose to spend on the NHS the money it currently gets back from the EU (£115m a week in 2014), thus cutting funding for agriculture, regional development and research by that amount.



It assumes the UK economy will not be adversely affected by Brexit, which many economists doubt.

But is what Johnson is saying now different?

The foreign secretary did not repeat the error of saying Britain “sends” £350m a week to Brussels. But he did say that after Britain leaves the EU it would “take back control” of roughly that sum, and he suggested “a lot of it” could go on the NHS.

This is why Sir David Norgrove accused Johnson of “a clear misuse of official statistics” in choosing to “repeat the figure of £350m per week, in connection with the amount that might be available for extra public spending”.

The foreign secretary has since described the response from the head of the statistics watchdog as “a wilful distortion of the text of my article”. To say he had suggested £350m a week “might be available for extra public spending” was “a complete misrepresentation” of what he said, Johnson claimed.

His supporters may feel Johnson is justified in his complaint. But his detractors – especially given the number of times he appeared in front of the Vote Leave bus with the £350m claim on it – may feel that at best he is pushing his luck.

Did he say anything else?

Johnson made a false claim in his letter to Norgrove. He wrote that the UK’s rebate “only forms part of the EU’s financing arrangement with the agreement of all the other member states. We do not control it ourselves.”

This is not true. The complex mechanism for calculating Britain’s rebate, the amount of which varies each year, was agreed by all member states and can only be changed with the agreement of all those states – including, while it is a member, Britain.

The rebate is also money that never leaves Britain, and the EU has no say over how it is spent. In that sense, at least, Britain certainly “controls it”.

Why has Johnson brought this all up again?



It seems unlikely that the foreign secretary does not know the difference between a gross and a net sum, nor understand the wider objections to the £350m figure and the claims surrounding it.

His allies say Johnson has been bruised by claims he misled the public during the campaign. But it is clear that the figure, dishonest as it was, proved effective in securing the Brexit vote.

Reviving it now serves two purposes: with the government leaning towards continuing substantial payments to the EU as part of a transition process (something Johnson opposes), it focuses public attention on the question of how much the UK “sends” to Brussels; and with Johnson reportedly feeling left out of the Brexit debate, it gets everyone talking about him.