UK's IMF subscription up by £9bn

15 June 2011 Last updated at 15:16 GMT The UK is to increase its subscription to the International Monetary Fund by more than ?9bn a year - almost doubling it contribution.

It currently provided ?10.54bn, based on voting rights that reflect the size of the UK economy.

But the G20 group of wealthy and developed nations agreed to increase the IMF's lending capacity, after debt crises in Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

A Treasury source said UK taxpayers would not be affected by the rise.

The scale of the increase emerged in a piece of secondary legislation from the government laid before Parliament on Tuesday.

'Very concerned'

Conservative MP Douglas Carswell said: "I'm appalled to see at a time of cutbacks at home, at a time when many constituents are worried about cuts in public services in the UK that we're doubling the amount of subscription that we pay to the IMF."

"I'm very concerned that the government tried to announce this, not by standing up in the Commons and telling us that it was spending the money in this way, not by having a debate to allow MPs to question the wisdom of doing this but by slipping it through when no-one was looking with a written statement.

"We're talking about an enormous sum of money. We're talking about the equivalent of 1.5p on income tax. I think a lot of people will be quite shocked to discover that we're increasing our subscription to the IMF in order to bail out the eurozone."

But a Treasury source told the BBC: "Any suggestion that the UK taxpayer faces additional costs is wrong.

"We are lending money from existing foreign exchange reserves to the IMf on which they pay interest to us. It has no impact on our borrowing whatsoever."

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