(LONDON) - The European Union appears to be "sleepwalking into a vast financial commitment" with its troubled Galileo satellite network, and a rigorous cost-benefit analysis must be produced on the system, a British parliamentary committee said Monday.

In a report into the network, the House of Commons Transport Committee said it had serious concerns about the Galileo project, and complained about the lack of assessment that measured the system's true benefits and risks.

The committee called on the British government to do everything in its power to prevent the programme going ahead without the cost-benefit analysis.

European Parliament deputies said last month the ambitious project should be given 890 million euros (1.3 billion dollars) in the EU's 2008 budget.

The European Commission published proposals in September to raise an extra 2.4 billion euros for the 30-satellite project, mainly using unspent money intended for farm subsidies from the EU's joint budget.

In "an almost unprecedented move, the EC now proposes that several billion euros should be transferred from other Community budgets, such as agriculture, to the Galileo programme," the committee said.

In that scenario, European taxpayers would then have to "foot the entire, spiralling bill for the project".

The committee's chair, Gwyneth Dunwoody, said that Galileo "may be obsolete even before it is operational".

"What taxpayers in the UK and other European countries really need and want is better railways and roads, not giant signature projects in the sky, providing services that we already have from GPS (Global Positioning System) and other systems," she said.

Dunwoody added: "The (British) government must stop this folly, and endeavour to bring the EC to its senses. The commission is poised to spend billions of taxpayers' money on a satellite system without any realistic assessment of its costs and benefits."

Work on Galileo, supposed to be a showcase for Europe's technical prowess and meant to rival the US GPS, has stalled as cost over-runs pile up, private contractors bicker and member nations push their own industrial interests.

It was originally slated to launch in 2008, but it is now set to be deployed in 2013.

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