What happened
The £350m figure appeared everywhere: bus, leaflets, TV debates. It was false in every meaningful sense.
The UK's gross contribution to the EU was around £19bn a year. But the UK received its rebate (negotiated by Thatcher), EU structural funds to UK regions, and farm payments, reducing the net figure to around £9bn — roughly £170m a week. The £350m was the gross figure before the UK got anything back.
The UK Statistics Authority wrote to the Vote Leave campaign to say the figure was 'a clear misuse of official statistics'. The chair of the independent statistics body publicly called it misleading. Vote Leave continued using it anyway.
The morning after the Leave vote, Farage appeared on television and said: 'I would say that was a mistake.' Johnson's team quietly dropped the NHS pledge within days.
Not a penny of the money 'saved' went to the NHS. In the years following Brexit, NHS funding was squeezed further while the cost of implementing Brexit — customs infrastructure, regulatory divergence, border systems, trade deal negotiations — ran into the tens of billions.