Constituents want certainties about the EU debate - the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies provide this

Paul Johnson (IFS director and an author of the report published yesterday) said: ‘Leaving the EU would most likely increase borrowing by between £20 and £40 billion in 2019–20. Getting to budget balance from there, as the government desires, would require an additional year or two of austerity at current rates of spending cuts. Or we could live with higher borrowing and debt’ (IFS Press Release, 25 May 2016, link).

The IFS also pour further scorn on the Leave campaign’s claims about the cost of EU membership: ‘Claims that we would have an additional £350 million a week to spend are wrong. They imply that following a UK exit other EU countries would continue to pay a rebate to the UK on contributions it was not making. Such claims also imply we would simply stop all existing EU subsidies to farming and poorer regions (such as Northumberland, Cornwall and west Wales) (IFS Press Release, 25 May 2016, link).

Paul Johnson also told Today: ‘You cannot get a better trading relationship with the European Union than the one we already have. It is as free as it is possible to have between one country and another set of countries...at the moment nearly half, 44 per cent of our exports go into the European Union and whatever deal we came out with would be worse than the deal that we have at the moment’ (Today, BBC Radio Four, 25 May 2016).