£30m in EU child benefits: unclear how much of it is paid by Britain

News that German Chancellor Angela Merkel's party has endorsed a cut to child benefits entitlement for migrants in Germany has led a number of papers to bring up an estimate of Britain's own contribution, said to be £30 million.

We've looked into this before. We found that the figures don't show how much of the money is paid by Britain, and how much of it is paid by other countries under their own child benefit schemes.

The £30m estimate takes the number of children for whom the benefit is paidwho receive the benefit from the UK while living abroad, and multiplies it by the average amount they're likely to be eligible for under UK rules.

But, as we said before:

"when a family is eligible to claim family benefits in another country and the UK, the British government will sometimes step in to top up the award given in the host country so that it meets UK levels."

So some of the children included in the figures won't be receiving the full amount they would have been eligible for in the UK.

Because we don't know how many of these children there are, we don't know how much the total bill is.