Although the government announced in April a £250m fund for repairing potholes, the sum will be spread over five years. Local councils will receive just £50 million in 2016/17, but with more than 100 councils in England lining up to receive the cash, the funding has been described as a 'drop in the ocean' compared to the scale of our road maintenance problem.
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The Local Government Association (LGA) has calculated that the backlog in road repairs will take £12 billion and "more than a decade" to clear. Cllr Martin Tett, LGA transport spokesman, said: “While £50 million is a step in the right direction, councils need more than 230 times that amount to cover the £11.8 billion cost to bring our roads up to scratch.

"The money announced today will help those councils receiving it to tackle potholes, but it would not even completely cover the cost of the £69 million faced by the average authority to bring its roads up to a reasonable condition.

“The condition of our roads is only going to get worse unless we address it as a national priority. The government’s own traffic projections predict a potential increase in traffic of up to 55% by 2040. Councils desperately need long-term and consistent funding to invest in the resurfacing projects which our road network desperately needs over the next decade", Cllr Tett warned.

The AA's survey of 25,208 drivers revealed that 39% said their tyres, bodywork or other parts of their vehicles had been affected after hitting a pothole in the past two years. Responding to the survey's findings, AA president Edmund King called on local authorities to "get to grips with fundamental road maintenance".

Earlier this year the RAC also reported that pothole-related call-outs had risen 25% between 2014 and 2015 to 25,487.

But it's not only drivers our damaged roads affect seriously. Cycling UK's campaigns coordinator Sam Jones commented that "Potholes can be a lethal danger to cyclists and other vulnerable road users. In 2014, the police decided that a 'poor or defective' road surface contributed to almost three times more crashes involving pedal cyclists than it did in those involving cars."

Potholes may seem like a peripheral and minor problem, but it's one that clearly affects a large number of people very directly and expensively, whether through having to replace a punctured tyre, make mechanical repairs, losing work or job opportunities caused by a damaged car being off the road or, worse, accident and injury. It seems that the government can only afford to allocate £50 million a year to tackling this nationwide problem while £121 million every week is lavished on the EU - even accounting for all the grants and subsidies we receive back.

Voting to leave the EU on 23 June and save £121 million a week for spending elsewhere offers a much better chance of taking bigger steps to solving this major problem of our poor quality roads.

Savings will be found by cutting beds, slashing GP prescriptions, reducing the use of agency staff and reviewing services such as on sexual health, according to NHS Lothian plans for 2016-17.
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NHS chiefs are struggling to tackle a £77 million funding gap caused by rising demand and an ageing population.

The latest proposals include a bid to reduce reliance on the private sector, which NHS Lothian uses if its own hospitals don't have the capacity to meet Scottish Government operation time guarantees.

The move is likely to delay elective surgeries such as knee operations and hip replacements, leaving patients in pain for longer.

Managing NHS funding in Scotland is devolved to the Scottish Parliament, which receives a block grant from the UK government linked to NHS spending in England via the Barnett formula. If NHS spending in England rises due to the UK gaining a net £121 million a week from leaving the EU, then Scotland's NHS grant will rise accordingly. 

The £25 million needed to avoid these dramatic cuts to NHS services is little more than a day's worth of the amount currently paid to the European Union; a shocking mismatch in our public spending priorities, given the huge, direct and very personal difference that an effective NHS makes to the lives of many thousands of people who need medical help.

Voting to Leave the EU on 23 June will release an extra £121 million every week to easily provide the necessary funding to prevent these cuts, and much more.

Local NHS leaders have claimed that the move could increase investment in healthcare facilities closer to home and avoid the need for people to go into hospital.

But those who do need hospital treatment will find four community hospitals - in Bovey Tracey, Ashburton, Dartmouth and Paignton - closed and the number of minor injury units reduced from seven to just three, putting additional pressure on other, already over-stretched NHS facilities.
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In its consultation document  (page 12), the South Devon and Torbay Clinical Commissioning Group confirm that "the demands on funds outstrip any new funding available and the CCG needs to make significant savings over each of the coming years. For 2016/17 we currently have a £16m shortfall."

The proposed closures, described as a "slash and burn" approach to local NHS services by Torbay & South Devon Trades Union Council secretary Paul Raybould, are expected to contribute just £1.4m to this shortfall. Yet the entire £16m total deficit in South Devon NHS funding provoking these changes could easily be found by the government if we were to stop handing a net £121 million to the European Union every single week - the amount Britain pays into the EU budget over and above all the grants and subsidies the EU hands back.

Unless the local NHS funding shortfall is found from somewhere, as Mr Raybould added: "We fear other community hospitals may also be at risk with the CCG looking to save money." Since the sum to save these four Devon hospitals represents less than a day's worth of the money that would be saved by leaving the EU, a great step towards finding the money to stop these cuts is to vote to leave the EU in the referendum on 23 June.

As the EU referendum edges closer, the Democracy Movement has launched its latest campaign for a 'leave' vote on 23 June.

Better Britain aims to highlight the huge net cost of Britain's payments into the EU budget - an astonishing £121 million every single week, even accounting for our rebate and all the grants and subsidies we receive back - and to show what a big difference this money could instead make to people's lives and to the public services and infrastructure up and down the country on which we all depend.

In every area of the country today there are examples of public services that are being cut, or improvements that can’t be made, due to budget shortfalls that are tiny fractions of our net contribution to the EU budget - from insufficient school places to overstretched GP surgeries, from delayed road improvements to funding new, life-changing drugs on the NHS. 

Cash costs

There has been considerable debate about the accurate cash cost of EU membership. So where does our figure of
£121 million a week come from?

It starts with a Treasury report 'EU Finances 2015', published in December. These official government figures show that, last year, the gross cost of the EU was £17.8 billion. This is the figure that gives rise to the often-quoted amount of 
£350 million a week. However, this figure doesn't account for our rebate, or money we receive back from the EU; an omission that has, unfortunately, been the focus of a huge amount of debate and has obscured the real, still very significant net costs.

After subtracting our rebate of £4.8 billion, together with public sector grants and subsidies back from the EU of
£4.5 billion, that leaves a net cost in 2015 of £8.5 billion. But that's not quite the end of the story.  

The EU also gives grants to some private institutions. Paragraph 3.7, under the table at the link above, shows that the latest published figures relate to 2013 and amount to a further £1.4 billion.

Finally, in calculating UK spending on international aid towards our legal commitment of 0.7% of national income, the government also includes our share of aid provided to developing countries by the EU. If we leave the EU and are no longer paying into the EU budget, we will not be able to count a share of EU aid towards our overall spending commitment. So an equivalent amount will need to be added to the international aid budget to make up the shortfall towards meeting the 0.7% commitment. According to the Department for International Development document Statistics on International Development 2015, in 2014 the share of EU aid that the UK counted towards our 0.7% commitment was £816 million.

This leaves an estimated final net total paid to the EU in 2015 - the spending of which the government will be able to reallocate if we leave - of £6.3 billion a year, or £121 million a week. It's 'estimated', because those figures on grants to private institutions and international aid relate to 2013 and 2014, rather than 2015 - but those are the latest years for which figures are available.

Indirect costs

This total represents the best estimate for the published, cash costs of EU membership. It does not include the indirect costs, such as the cost of regulation.

Over the scale and breadth of policy the EU now governs, the cost of regulation is very hard to quantify. Some groups, like Open Europe, have come up with credible figures. However, even on leaving the EU, we will very likely wish to continue with some EU-derived regulations in UK law, together with some other product and market rules that have been made internationally and have just been handed down through the EU. The government has refused consistently to conduct a full cost-benefit analysis of Britain's EU membership. 

Much is also written about the proportion of our trade that goes to EU countries. It's not often noted that only a relatively small proportion of the UK economy is involved in international trade at all. Most UK economic activity is domestic, meaning that for most businesses EU single market regulations are all cost for no benefit.

Due to the scale of EU regulation and the big question of which regulations we might keep or bin after exit, the indirect costs are a hugely debatable area. That's why we're focusing only on the verifiable, officially published cash costs of EU membership. £121 million is the extra amount every week we know with far greater certainty that the government will have available to spend, if we vote to leave the EU.

IN misleads

The EU lobby often tries to make the scale of the money Britain pays into the EU budget appear smaller, by comparing it to a huge number like Britain's total GDP, or dividing it by a large number like the total population to get a figure 'per person'.

In doing so, they try to suggest absurdly that £121 million every week isn't really much money to worry about.

Better Britain aims to show how wrong they are. Our campaign will detail all the ways up and down the country in which public services are being cut, or aren't able to improve, due to shortfalls in funding that are a tiny fraction of the huge payments made every week to the EU.

It will show how a vote to leave the EU on 23 June can make a Better Britain for us all.