Reality Check

The claim: Phones4U founder John Caudwell says: "We suffer an £8bn net loss to Europe." He’s referring to the amount of money Britain pays into the EU budget each year.

Reality Check verdict: He’s right on the numbers – the UK contributes just over £8bn a year to the EU Budget after deducting the rebate and direct payments to public and private sector groups in the UK. Whether that counts as a loss depends on your perspective – that money is spent on running EU institutions, pan-European initiatives and projects in other countries.

Read the full Reality Check here. 

Reality Check

The claim: UKIP leader Nigel Farage says the National Insurance numbers show that migration to the UK from the EU is much higher than official figures suggest.

Reality Check verdict: There are good reasons why the NI number and official immigration figures would be different, but they are strikingly far apart, and next month's figures showing how many of the numbers are active should help reconcile the two.

Read the full Reality Check here.

Reality Check

The claim: Former cabinet secretary Lord O'Donnell fears that negotiating the UK's exit from the European Union would take longer than the two years permitted, which could leave the UK facing higher tariffs.

Reality Check verdict: There are strong views on both sides, but without a crystal ball, neither side can be certain their hopes, fears or forecasts will turn out to be true.

Read the full Reality Check here.

Reality Check

The claim: The number of job vacancies in the UK is falling because employers are worried about the possibility of the UK leaving the European Union.

Reality Check verdict: False - the report on which this claim is based does not look into the impact of the referendum on vacancies.

Read the full Reality Check here.

Reality Check

The Claim: The UK leaving the EU would add £500m a year to UK energy bills.

Reality Check verdict: There is considerable uncertainty about the figure and much of the effect could be avoided by staying in the Internal Energy Market.

Read the full Reality Check here.

Reality Check

THE CLAIM: There is EU legislation that restricts the weight, size and composition of coffins. 

REALITY CHECK VERDICT: As Mayor Johnson might say – piffle. There isn’t, and never has been, any such regulation.

Read the full Reality Check here.

Reality Check

THE CLAIM: Farmers in certain non-EU countries get more money from government than their EU counterparts. 

REALITY CHECK VERDICT: True – farmers in some non-EU countries do get higher subsidies, but no reason to think that would be matched in a post-Brexit UK.

Read the full Reality Check here.

Reality Check

THE CLAIM: Being part of the EU has cleaned up UK beaches, improved water supplies and we would not be discussing air pollution without it.

REALITY CHECK VERDICT: A bit over the top. We managed to pass the Clean Air Act before the EEC even existed.

Read the full Reality Check here.

Reality Check

THE CLAIM: 70% of UK trade currently takes place with countries with whom we have no trade deals at all.

REALITY CHECK VERDICT: False - UK trade statistics don't bear that out.

Read the full Reality Check here.

Reality Check

THE CLAIM: If the UK left the EU it would have an extra £10bn to spend on ending austerity.

REALITY CHECK VERDICT: They've got their sums wrong - post-Brexit the UK certainly wouldn't have £10bn extra to spend and it could be considerably less.

Read the full Reality Check here.  

Reality Check

Image source, Thinkstock

As the EU referendum campaign continues you will be seeing lots of headlines about how much Brexit would cost or benefit the UK economy, or indeed how much staying in will cost the economy.

Should you care?

As George Box, one of the greatest statisticians of the 20th Century, said: "All models are wrong, but some are useful."

Get all your questions answered about economic modelling here. 

Reality Check

The Centre for Economic Performance says that the UK leaving the EU would cost each UK household £850 a year. Is that true?

Of course not - it's economic modelling. 

Such predictions are always enormously sensitive to the assumptions you make and nobody really knows what would happen if Brexit happened.

Read more here. 

Reality Check

Today's CEP report on the cost of Brexit says: "We calculate this [Brexit] results in a 1.3% fall in average UK incomes (or £850 per household)."

If a 1.3% fall in household income would be a fall of £850, then average household income would have to be about £65,000.

Actually, ONS figures from the end of 2014 suggested that average household income was about £39,200, so a 1.3% fall would be just over £500.

The CEP are checking the figures, but so far say you get to the £850 by taking the cash figure for GDP (£1.8tn in 2015), taking 1.3% of that and dividing it by the 27 million households in the UK, which actually gives you £861.

So that's the fall in GDP per household - is that the same as a 1.3% fall in average household income? Watch this space.

Reality Check

Can it really be the case that suggesting a vote to leave the European Union would create uncertainty means you are backing the Remain side?

Some felt that the way chancellor George Osborne quoted the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) in his Budget speech made the independent body seem in favour of staying in the EU.

This was the line he quoted: "Whatever the long-term pros or cons of the UK’s membership of the European Union, a vote to leave in the forthcoming referendum could usher in an extended period of uncertainty regarding the precise terms of the UK’s future relationship with the EU."

"This could have negative implications for activity via business and consumer confidence and might result in greater volatility in financial and other asset markets."

Is there going to be uncertainty?

In the murky world of economic forecasting, predicting uncertainty is about as safe as it gets. How can anyone disagree with you? 

In its forecasts, the OBR assumed that the UK would be staying in the EU, because that's what Parliament told it to do, and it did not calculate what would happen in other scenarios. 

And the passage that the chancellor quoted didn't even say that there would be uncertainty it said there could be, which is hedging your bets to an extraordinary extent.

After that he says it "could have negative implications" and "might" lead to volatility, which is hedging his bets again.

If the OBR were trying to come out in favour of staying in the EU I would expect it to do a better job than this. 

Reality Check

Image source, Getty Images

In return for doing a deal with the European Union accepting migrants back from Greece, Turkey has asked for visa-free access to the Schengen Area from June, doubling of the €3bn (£2.4bn) of EU emergency funding already agreed and new talks on its application to join the EU.

But that application is making very slow progress. Turkey applied to join what was then the European Economic Community in 1987. It then waited 10 years to be declared "eligible" for accession talks, which finally started in October 2005. 

A country has to adopt and enforce all the current EU rules before it can be admitted to the bloc, and in 10 years Turkey only managed to adopt a tiny proportion of them, in the area of science and research. 

The European Commission has recently expressed concerns about Turkey's human rights record and limits to freedom of expression. Furthermore, Cyprus will not agree to open further negotiations on Turkey's EU membership bid until Ankara recognises the Cypriot government as the legitimate government of the whole island. Turkey is the only country in the world that recognises the northern, Turkish part as a separate state.

Many EU members are wary about Turkish membership of the EU and the government in Ankara is divided on the issue too. The European Commission has said no new country will join the EU within the next five years and at the moment Turkish membership seems a long way off.

Read more of Ben's analysis here.

Reality Check

Thousands of European Union regulations and other laws have been adopted over the years to set out the rules of the single market. 

In the 1980s and 1990s the number of EU regulations was high. In 1983 alone, the number exceeded 14,500, external. 

In recent years, the number has gone down considerably. In 2015 the EU adopted, external 839 new regulations and 430 amending regulations: a total of 1,269, not 2,500.

Regulations are EU laws that take effect without any need for additional national legislation. 

Some of the regulations have no impact on the UK businesses, as they have nothing to do with it. For example, the regulations governing the production of olive oil and the growing of tobacco have little impact on UK farmers.

The EU also agrees a number of directives every year. Directives are EU laws that give “direction” or “goals” that all EU countries must achieve through their national parliaments. In 2015, the EU adopted 10 new and 26 amending directives.

How much does it cost?

So, what is the balance of cost and benefits that those EU rules have in the UK? And would their cost be eliminated if the UK left the EU?

In 2015, Open Europe, external, a think-tank calling for a reform of the EU, published a study that looked into 100 EU laws that are considered most burdensome to the UK economy as a whole. It concluded that they cost the UK economy £33.3bn a year, or £640 million a week.

The study was based on the government’s impact assessments, which look into cost and benefit of every new EU law to the UK economy. The government says the benefits of those 100 rules exceeded the costs, leaving the UK economy better off by £25.3bn year or £487 million a week. 

Open Europe acknowledges there is a benefit as well as cost to those rules, but argues that 95% of the benefits envisaged by the government had failed to materialise. For example, the think-tank said there were no benefits from the EU’s climate targets because a global deal to reduce carbon emissions had not been agreed yet.

Crucially, however, Open Europe pointed out that leaving the EU would cut some of the costs but would not eliminate them, because “the UK would still need to ensure that it came into line with European rules on trade for all commercial transactions with EU member countries”.

Reality Check

Speakers at the launch of Greens for a Better Europe this morning talked a lot about how the EU Referendum would be a good opportunity to get more people on the electoral roll.

Caroline Lucas MP said: "Young people are more likely to be pro-EU but are also less likely to vote."

To check whether this is true you have to look at opinion polls, which we are a bit suspicious about, especially when it's something we haven't had a vote on for a long time.

Nonetheless, in the 18 polls that have been conducted since the beginning of February, the average score has been 52 to 48 in favour of staying in the EU, but among 18 to 24 year olds it has been 75 to 25 in favour, which is a pretty wide margin.

Testing the second part of the claim is also reliant on polls. This piece of work from Ipsos Mori, external gives estimates of how particular age-groups voted in the General Election, based on all of its polling throughout the campaign.

It estimates that people are more likely to vote the older they get, with those aged between 18 and 24 having a turnout of 43%, while those aged over 65 have a 78% turnout.

Of course, general election turnouts may not be a good guide to referendum turnouts. In the Scottish independence referendum there was a turnout of 84.6%.

Reality Check

Image source, Reuters

Also in his speech today Boris Johnson claimed that the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) adds £400 a year to the cost of food for every household.

This figure comes from a report published by the TaxPayers’Alliance in 2009, external which looked at the UK’s share of the CAP budget as well as the effect on food prices. It says that each of those factors accounts for about half of the overall £400 figure.

The budget for the CAP then, quoted by the report, was €52 billion (about £42bn).

On food prices, the report refers to a letter sent by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling to other EU ministers in 2008 which said that the elements of the CAP that are designed to keep food prices above world market levels cost EU consumers €43 billion a year (about £34bn).

Put together, with a few other smaller factors, the report estimated the total cost to the UK at £10.3bn or £398 per household.

Since 2009 the CAP has been reformed in ways which have probably reduced its effect on food prices but it’s very difficult to come up with a precise figure. And the CAP budget has risen a bit – it will be €55.4bn in 2016.

But the bigger question is how much of this money would be saved if Britain left the EU. That would depend on what system of farm subsidies we set up and whether we continued to impose tariffs on cheaper imports from the rest of the world.

Reality Check

Earlier this week, some of Britain's leading scientists - including Professor Stephen Hawking - called for a vote to remain in the European Union at the coming referendum.  

They said leaving the EU would be a "disaster for UK science".  

But, as the BBC’s science editor David Shukman reports, their views are not held by everyone in the scientific community.

Reality Check

Image source, Reuters

The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) is a free trade bilateral agreement between Canada and the European Union. The agreement eliminates 98% of tariffs between the two countries.

It is set to come into force this year. The process started with an impact assessment in 2008, reaching a breakthrough deal in October 2013. It is expected to be signed this year and come into force in 2017., external 

Under a similar timetable we wouldn’t be implementing a free trade deal until 2025.

The government says the disadvantages of a Canada-style agreement would be:

• Canada has only partial access to the EU Single Market, including for financial services
• Quotas remain in place for key agricultural exports. For the UK this could mean, for example, a 12% tariff on a large share of the UK’s beef exports to the EU
• Canadian manufacturers, such as carmakers, must comply with Rules of Origin, requiring that a proportion of the product is made in Canada in order to qualify for preferential tariffs on trade with the EU. This means extra bureaucratic costs
• Firms that export to the EU have to comply with EU product standards and technical requirements without any say in setting them.

On the other hand, if the UK were to try to pursue this sort of deal, it would be tailored to the major export/import markets between the UK and the EU. For example, financial services, as a huge part of the UK economy, would presumably be very high on the UK's list of priorities during the negotiations.