Brexit gives us the opportunity to decentralise the British government

Part of the process of leaving the EU will be the rebuilding of government departments that have been weakened by our membership of the EU and this presents a huge opportunity to deliver on the half-arsed attempts to decentralise the British government.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) have done little more than police farmers to ensure they are doing what the EU tells them to do and administer the subsidy system ever since responsibility for farming and environmental policy was handed over to the EU many years ago. DEFRA - or whatever replaces it - will need to grow significantly when the UK regains control of farming, environment and fisheries and that growth should be outside of London.

The case for rebuilding DEFRA outside of London is possibly the strongest of all British government departments. Anyone who's been to the home of the civil service in Whitehall will have noticed a distinct lack of fields and livestock in the immediate vicinity. Whilst living and working in a city of 9m people doesn't preclude you from holding the necessary qualifications, it does result in a detachment from the reality of rural life which should be a pretty key requirement from policy makes in that department.

Locating the newly rebuilt DEFRA or is successor somewhere like Great Yarmouth or Felixstowe on the east coast would expose policy makers to the consequences of the decisions they make as well as providing some welcome investment in local and regional infrastructure in East Anglia, for example.

If proven successful, the Department for Transport should follow the decentralisation blueprint. London is the worst place to put anyone responsible for national transport policy because public transport in London is like nothing else in England. It gives ministers and civil servants a severely distorted view of how public transport works (or more often than not, doesn't) and leads to the kind of decisions that penalise people who rely on their own vehicles. Locating the DfT outside a metropolitan area would help make transport policy work for everyone, not just the privileged minority who live in large, well-connected cities.

UKIP has long championed localism and Brexit provides a perfect opportunity to deliver that change.

EU has been fining the UK for poor accounting

With no sense of irony whatsoever, the EU have been fining the UK for poor accounting over farm subsidies.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) exists solely to administer EU agricultural subsidies and implement EU directives as the British government long ago outsourced all agriculture policy to the EU. In England, the return of a fraction of our membership fees in the form of farm payments is administered by DEFRA who have failed to follow the lead set by the Scottish and Welsh governments whose systems are far superior and this has resulted in £642m of our own money having to be paid back to the EU in the form of fines.

The EU Court of Auditors inspects the EU's accounts every year and then makes a statement based on the level of fraud, corruption and incompetence contained therein. For the last 19 years the EU Court of Auditors have flagged up serious levels of fraud, corruption and incompetence in the EU's accounts despite already having a pretty generous threshold of allowing 2% of transactions to be unacceptable. The EU fails to keep losses caused by fraud, corruption and incompetence below £2 for every £100 being spent. If the EU was a company, those in charge would be banned from being directors and would probably have gone to prison.