The UK government has been told that extending the transition period after Brexit would expose Britain to £5bn of new EU contributions without any say about how the money is spent.
MPs on the European scrutiny committee sounded the alarm on Thursday after the UK proposed that the length of transition should be determined simply by how long it would take.
Anything beyond the 21-month period preferred by the EU would take Britain into the next seven-year budget cycle and would almost certainly require the country to top up its recently agreed divorce settlement of between £35bn and £39bn.
Crucially, the new money would be spent in ways over which Britain would have no influence because it would have ceased to be a formal member of the EU before the budgeting process concluded, the committee said.
“This is rather like Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected,” said the committee chairman, Bill Cash, who estimated the extra cost at between £4bn and £5bn. “It begins to look like this is as long as a piece of string.”
Robin Walker, a Brexit minister, and Sir Tim Barrow, the ambassador to the EU, both insisted that a long extension was unlikely and said the detail of any new payments would be a matter for negotiation.
“We believe the length of implementation should be determined by what is practical,” Walker told the committee. “At the moment we think that is around two years, which is different but not that much different from the EU proposal.”
Immediately after the hearing, however, the committee issued a letter calling on the Treasury for urgent clarification. “The longer the transition, the more the UK would have to contribute to EU spending commitments which it cannot block or influence once it ceases to be a member state,” it wrote. [...]
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