The European Commission has issued Britain with a bill for £1.09 billion on the very evening that it finally left the EU.

Every year Brussels recalculates the contributions member states make to the EU Budget. This year, due to an increase in Gross National Income and VAT contributions, EU officials believe Britain owes an extra €1.3 billion.

The demand for payment was sent to the UK embassy to the EU and has been notified to the British government.

EU sources said the bill was for the period of 2019-20. Britain’s payment to Brussels for 2019 was nearly £9 billion pounds. If the figure is similar in 2020, it could mean Britain pays up to £10 billion in what could be its final payment to the EU Budget.

The bill will only add weight to Brexiteers’ argument that Britain is right to leave the EU because it is effectively being punished for the strength of its economy with demands for more cash to be sent to Brussels. Britain gets a rebate on its EU budget payments.

The amount for the rebate, which was secured by Margaret Thatcher, is revised according to EU economic data. Sources believe the £1.09 billion bill could be halved once those revisions take effect. In 2018, the budget rebate was worth about £4 billion, meaning the final bill was around £9 billion rather than £13 billion.

"This bill will come down in negotiations. But the point is that we need to be in control of our own money. That's why we're leaving, " said a UK government source.

The bill emerged on the last day of the EU’s long goodbye to Great Britain as Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, pictured below, said: “We open another chapter. It is a story of old friends and new beginnings.”