Andy Burnham stands accused of planning to burden working families with a bill of £1,220 each as the price of his ‘reset’ of relations with the EU.
Kemi Badenoch said a leaked draft agreement between London and Brussels shows Britain would have to contribute toward funding net zero schemes or infrastructure programmes in countries such as Romania and Hungary.
When combined with other commitments, Mrs Badenoch said the total bill for the country would be £23billion over the course of Mr Burnham’s ten-year plan.
The Prime Minister is preparing to sign up to a post-Brexit ‘reset’ at a summit on November 20.
The Tories said the leaked draft agreement showed that Labour was preparing to agree to ‘an appropriate level of financial contribution towards reducing economic and social disparities between the regions of the EU’.
They pointed to the example of Switzerland, which struck a similar agreement but ended up paying millions into EU schemes that had no benefit for Swiss taxpayers, such as promoting renewable energy on the Bucharest metro.
The party says that the Government would run up a bill of £13billion over ten years.
The sum comes on top of the £570million a year the UK has agreed to pay into the Erasmus+ student exchange scheme, the £580million a year we could pay to subsidise tuition fees for EU students, and an unspecified ‘financial contribution’ to the EU’s Channel Action Plan.
Andy Burnham is preparing to sign up to a post-Brexit ‘reset’ at a summit on November 20
Mrs Badenoch said: ‘What I see from Burnham is not confidence but weakness. His claims, telling the world that Brexit has been bad for the UK, have weakened his negotiating position. So he is going to the EU as a supplicant and that will cost us all.
‘My worry is that Burnham will let Brussels play him for a fool. He seems so desperate for a deal that he is prepared to let Brussels dictate the terms.’
Labour MP Stella Creasy, chair of the Labour Movement For Europe, insisted that leaving the EU had ‘hit our economy substantially’.
She said: ‘The biggest trading bloc in the world is on our doorstep, and we walked out of it.’
Mr Burnham claims that new trade deals with Brussels would add 0.4 per cent to the UK’s GDP.
But Tory MP Sir Bernard Jenkin questioned the claim, saying: ‘We’ve no idea how it’s calculated, what it takes into account and what it doesn’t.’
A Conservative source said: ‘British taxpayers face a potential bill of £23billion over the next decade – which would be £1,220 per working family. All because Andy Burnham is desperate to appease his own backbenchers.’
But Labour dismissed the claim of a £23billion bombshell. A spokesman said: ‘These are made-up numbers from the Tories.
‘We are working on deals that pay off for farmers and families by cutting back paperwork and easing pressure on prices.’