The benefits of staying in the EU are worth £3,000 per year to the average household. Myth.

Stuart Rose, leader of the 'Britain Stronger in Europe' campaign keeps trotting this out.  Like all myths, he clearly thinks if you say it often enough, people will believe it.

Channel 4’s FactCheck

But Channel 4’s FactCheck has called this figure “fiction”, and with good reason.  It comes from a paper by the Brussels-funded CBI.  Apparently the CBI waste its time doing any research.  No, instead, it arbitrarily picked five estimates, evidently chosen because they gave pro-EU findings.  Then they plucked a figure from the top end of the range.  "It did what?" I hear you ask.  Yes, this is the body that claims to speak as the voice of business, big business it has to be said.

As FactCheck says, the CBI number is “way more optimistic than most other estimates, and we can’t / don’t really know how CBI researchers have arrived at this figure”.

For most UK households, the three largest budget items are food, fuel and tax.

All three ought to fall if we leave the EU. Groceries will be cheaper because we will no longer have to subsidise Continental farmers under the CAP (see previous blogs).  Fuel bills will fall without EU rules requiring us to buy more expensive alternative energy.  And the £350 million we send to Brussels every week would be enough to give the entire country a 71 per cent council tax rebate.