 If you tot up all your household bills, which are the main ones? Obviously it depends on circumstances. For some it's the mortgage payments or the rent. For others the cost of running the car. For most of us though, three items are at or near the top of the list. Food bills, fuel bills and taxes. Taxes are the item we tend to overlook because they are dispersed and disguised. We don't always notice what we're paying through VAT or PAYE. Although if we consolidated all our tax bills they would probably be the single largest item. So let's start closer to home. What would be the impact of leaving the EU on these three chief components of the average family budget? All surely would be lower after withdrawal. Taxation is the easiest to quantify. According to the Office for Budgetary Responsibility, OBR Britain's contribution to the EU in 2016 will be £19.6 billion gross or £11.1 billion net. Since we are measuring the impact on taxation it is the gross figure that is relevant here. Sure some of the money Britain hands over to the EU is returned or spent in this country but when measuring tax we don't deduct notional value. Ask your neighbours how much their council tax bill is. I doubt they'll subtract the value of the bin collection and the street lighting. So what does £19.6 billion amount to? According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, IFS it is equivalent to the combined revenue of vehicle excise £5.9 billion capital gains tax £5.4 billion air passenger duty £3.2 billion inheritance tax £3.9 billion and petroleum tax £1.2 billion. To put it another way it would allow the entire country to get a 71% rebate in council tax which raises £27.6 billion. If you prefer to look at spending then perhaps the best way to contextualise the cost of the EU is as follows. According to the IFS the combined savings made by all the departmental spending cuts during the 2010 to 2015 parliament was £35 billion. Treasury figures indicate that our gross contribution to the EU over the same period was £86 billion. More than twice as much as was saved by the austerity programme across the whole of domestic spending. Even if we insist on deducting the money that was spent in the UK our net contribution was still £45.4 billion over the lifetime of that parliament. How odd that during all the marches against austerity all the UK uncut protests all the furious editorials about Tory cuts no one pointed out that one clean excision using the gross figure would have reversed the entire cuts programme and still allowed us to take a penny of income tax. So much for our tax bills. What about our household bills? These are necessarily harder to quantify and people will understandably be jaded by the figures flying back and forth between the leave and remain camps. For example, the organisation Business for Britain published a massive half million word study which concluded that the average household might be better off by £933 a year as a result of lower prices outside the EU. But with pro-EU groups claiming the opposite readers will naturally be cynical. What seems undeniable is that for food and fuel bills the two largest household bills for most of us after tax any change would be downward. Britain is unusual in the EU being a food importer with relatively large and efficient farms. She has always been penalised both positively and negatively by the common agricultural policy, CAP, paying more into the system than other states and getting less out of it. It was mainly because of this structural imbalance that in 1984 Margaret Thatcher secured a partial rebate in Britain's budget contributions. Partial because it works as a percentage of the difference between contributions and receipts and therefore only operates to the extent that Britain is being adversely affected. As we have seen before 1973 the United Kingdom was in the habit of importing food and commodities from outside Europe. Some historians talk of the ghost acres in her colonies that allowed her to specialise in services and industry while importing wheat from Canada and meat and butter from Australia and New Zealand. After 1973, as the CAP was applied to Britain she moved away from purchasing food at world prices and increased her dependence on imports from other EEC states. Food prices rose sharply, especially meat and dairy products and cereals. Labour Eurosceptics in particular had campaigned against dearer food, arguing that an increase in grocery bills was in reality a form of regressive tax that hit the poor hardest since food represented a higher proportion of their household expenditure. They objected too to the impact on exporters in developing countries, especially in Africa, who found that their chief markets were closed to them by EEC protectionism. Indeed in many cases, poorer countries were not only impoverished by EEC protectionism but were also hit by dumping. Output-based subsidies produced European wine lakes and butter mountains which were sometimes sold at below-cost price to poorer countries, wiping out the one sector on which their export earnings would otherwise have depended. Although some of the abuses in the CAP have been tackled, food prices in Europe remain well above world levels. Britain is still one of the countries that suffers most from the CAP, which accounts for 40% of the EU budget and consumes 4.6 billion pounds of the UK's gross contribution to the EU. The CAP then pays British farmers some 2.9 billion pounds. It would, in other words, be possible not only to maintain the current level of support to British farmers but handsomely to increase it while still making a substantial saving for the nation. The end of the CAP would see British food prices fall back towards non-EU levels as tariffs and quotas were dropped. The fall in household bills would act as a stimulus to the entire economy and the return to the global trading system would facilitate trade agreements with non-EU producers, thus opening opportunities for, among others, British farmers. As for food, so for energy. The gains to consumers would also be gains for the UK as a whole. We would benefit both directly – we'd have more left in our bank accounts each month – and indirectly, the economy would be growing faster. As a result of EU policy we have some of the highest electricity and gas bills in the world. Brussels drives up prices in two ways through setting renewables targets and, since 2010, through direct legislation. As a result, a medium-sized business in the EU pays 20% more for energy than an equivalent firm in China, 65% more than one in India and 100% more than one in the United States. These artificially high energy prices have already closed down almost the whole of Britain's steel industry and now threaten other high-energy manufacturing sectors. And not just our businesses. In 2012 to 2013 the NHS spent an extraordinary £630 million on energy bills. It is of course true that the world is seeking to reduce carbon emissions and Britain would presumably remain part of that global effort inside or outside the EU. But the EU doesn't simply set a target for emissions cuts and leave it to the member states to meet it. That would be to accept the supremacy of the approach agreed at the 2015 Paris Climate Summit. Instead, Brussels supports specific forms of alternative energy in a way that has the incidental effect of purchasing the loyalty of those who supply it. Because most alternative energy schemes benefit people who own land, woods and suitable sites for wind farms they end up becoming a form of regressive taxation. People on low and medium incomes pay higher electricity bills to subsidise landowners. What it is far less useful for is reducing carbon emissions. As Friends of the Earth points out the impact of EU policy is in effect to force manufacturers and other businesses to outsource to places with far lower environmental standards. British industrialists naturally agree. So come to that, does the British Government agree? According to a study by the Department for Energy and Climate Change just two EU rules are responsible for 9% of the energy costs incurred by energy intensive businesses today a figure that will rise to 16% in 2030. The closure of Britain's steel mills in 2015 may be a grisly foretaste of what is to come. The strain is from the industry focused on Britain's inability to activate anti-dumping rules against China because as we have seen Britain has no vote on the WTO being instead represented there by the European Commission. The far more serious problem was the uncompetitive energy prices that place British manufacturers at a disadvantage vis-à-vis non-EU competitors. Which industry will be next? Paper mills, glass, ceramics, cement or perhaps the chemical industry already hobbled by the EU's reach directive which, exactly like the energy directives in effect forces importers to purchase stock from non-EU sources with less onerous regulations. The point is that as long as British businesses are regulated from abroad we cannot ensure that they operate within a framework tailored to suit their own needs. Cutting taxes, food bills and fuel bills will give the economy a far more effective and durable stimulus than quantitative easing ever did. And unlike that policy which disproportionately favoured wealthier people with assets this would be a highly progressive policy of most benefit to low income households a greater proportion of whose resources go on staples. It's worth dwelling on the advantage of lower bills because it illustrates something that is in danger of being overlooked in this referendum campaign namely the optimistic case for withdrawal. The way in which broadcasters in particular like to frame the debate is as sovereignty versus convenience or people versus business. In fact the strongest case for voting to leave is that it offers a better future not just a safer future not just a more democratic future not just a future where Britain's pride, confidence and global links are restored we'd be better off in the literal financial sense. Thank you.