Britain needs to stop almost half of EU migrants from claiming benefits soon after arriving in the UK, Michael Fallon has said.
The defence secretary confirmed renegotiating benefits for migrants would still be at the heart of David Cameron’s demands for reform, which will be set out in a letter and speech on Tuesday.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the UK wanted to “look at free movement as a whole and make sure that the right to claim is not the primary driver” for migration.
Figures released by Downing Street for the first time say 224,000, or 43%, of EU migrants are claiming benefits within four years of entering the UK at a cost of about £500m a year.
Of these, about two-thirds are claiming in-work benefits such as tax credits and housing benefit, the figures say.
Jonathan Portes, economist at NIESR who worked in the Cabinet Office, has pointed out that EU migrants are responsible only for a tiny proportion of the overall benefits bill.
But Fallon said the government’s aim was to stop benefits acting as an incentive to migrate, which he said had a knock-on impact on public services. He stressed the UK wanted changes that were “substantial” and “irreversible”, despite claims by Eurosceptics that Cameron’s demands are trivial.
“They’re not purely cosmetic changes, on the contrary, some of them are going to be opposed very bitterly by our partners in Europe, so they’ve got to be fought for if we’re going to end up with a deal that we can recommend to the British people,” he said.
