Dishonest Taxpayers' Alliance again miss the point

Another week, and another dishonest and misleading ‘report’ about the costs of the EU by a right-wing pressure group. This time the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance has published a book in which they claim that EU membership costs every citizen £2000 a year. Typically, it bases its figures on papers written by Patrick Minford and Ian Milne – both supporters of the Bruges group and both in favour of Britain withdrawing from the EU. Unsurprisingly, given the sources, the figures they claim are rather high. The frustrating thing is that these ‘studies’ are a complete waste of time – they are not designed to find the truth about the cost of regulation, but about feeding eye-catching figures to eurosceptic tabloids (as I pointed out in my reply to another such "study" last week by Open Europe.

Back the real world, the European Parliament yesterday voted to adopt legislation on type approval requirements for motor vehicles. This legislation includes a number of measures that will make cars and roads safer, including tyre pressure monitoring systems, wet-grip requirements for tyres and standards for tyres that will reduce fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. Costs will be outweighed by the benefits. Moreover, in this case (and many others), EU regulation means cutting red-tape for business by replacing the 50 or so existing type-approval certificates with just one.

So, will the Taxpayers’ Alliance or Open Europe report this example of ‘good regulation’? Yes, and pigs might fly.

The Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development is currently being considered by the institutions. Research is, of course, an area where it makes sense for all our member states to pool their resources: a common research programme on subjects of common interest is far more effective than duplicating each other 25 times over!

Part of the programme relates to medical research on public health issues. That has come under pressure from those who argue that it does not meet the priorities of economic competitiveness as defined in the Lisbon Agenda.

But this is a short-sighted view which should be refuted by ministers and MEPs who are currently deliberating on the programme’s priorities. Health research is not only worthwhile in its own right, but it is also worthwhile in terms of its economic merits.

Take, for example, respiratory health, which is currently missing from the programme. Respiratory health problems are Europe’s second biggest killer, accounting for one in four deaths. That costs our health systems EUR 102 million per year. It is also the major cause of absenteeism from work. It gets far less media coverage than cancer or cardiovascular diseases, but it ranks alongside them both in scale and in needing further research on countering the growth of lung diseases, asthma and so on. We must make sure that area of research forms part of the 7th programme.