Sixty million reasons we left! EU to spend £60m extra on staff – despite cutting MEPs

Brexit: Farage leaves European Parliament as MEP for final time

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The cash-thirsty institution wants to hire some 142 new workers to serve its 705 politicians at a cost of around £35 million. Each member of staff will earn on average £246,000 over the course of their three-year contract. According to internal information, the rest of the cash will be used to give pay rises to some of the more than 7,500 staff that are employed by the Parliament.

Documents show officials have paved the way for £1.8 billion of taxpayers’ cash to be spent on staffing next year.

This is a £59 million increase compared to the Hemicycle budget for 2021.

It was said the plan was drawn up to reduce the workload of MEPs and the Parliament’s administrative body.

Some 76 new officials will be distributed between the political groups while 66 will join the secretary-general’s task force.

The Parliament’s official administrative body had previously reduced its workforce by five percent between 2014 and 2020.

Former Brexit Party MEP Alex Phillips said Parliament staff barely had enough work to keep themselves occupied during her seven-month stint at the institution.

She said: “I can tell you right now from personal experience most MEP staff barely have enough to do to keep themselves occupied for even an hour a week.

“They love pretending to look busy, though scurrying down corridors with files, usually dressed like they are in Vogue.”

One former British staffer said: “Working at the European Parliament was one of the easiest gigs I have ever had.

“It was a very cushy mix of champagne receptions, long boozy lunches, and lightly-taxed paycheques.

“Yet you could always count on the French officials to find something to whine about.

“Quite why MEPs think they need to hire more staff is anyone’s guess.

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“You don’t need an army of assistants to fetch your dry cleaning, book your tax-funded limousines, or copy and paste ‘suggested’ legislative amendments from whichever corporate lobbyist has taken you out for lunch this week.

“All this whilst they rake in a six-figure salary that would make some lawyers blush! Nice work if you can get it.

“Even Nigel Farage would have struggled to come up with a better advertisement for Brexit. Thank God British taxpayers are no longer on the hook for this frivolous nonsense.”

As a result of Brexit, the EU Parliament cut the number of sitting MEPs for the rest of the bloc.

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Officials shrunk the number of £100,000-a-year politicians from 751 while Britain was still a member to just 705.

Fourteen of the EU’s 27 remaining member states were handed extra seats in an attempt to address previous imbalances.

France was handed an extra five MEPs, while Spain and Italy were given three new seats to occupy.

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