Today the Prime Minister has set out his long-term plan to fix the EUs immigration system - and to control immigration from Romania and Bulgaria In 2004, the Labour government made the decision that the UK should opt out of transitional controls on the new EU member states. They had the right to impose a seven-year ban before new citizens could come and work here, but Labour refused it. And when Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU, Labour had not learned the lesson. The other major lesson they didn’t learn was that failures in immigration policy were closely linked to welfare and education – if it does not pay to work, or if British people lack skills, that creates a huge space in our labour market for people from overseas to fill. That is why this Government is: • Training our own people to fill these jobs by providing record numbers of apprenticeships, demanding rigour in schools and building a welfare system that encourages work. • Changing the rules so that no one who comes to this country will be able to claim work benefits for the first three months. If after three months an EU national needs benefits they will only be able to claim for a maximum of six months unless they can prove they have a genuine prospect of employment. • Putting in place a new minimum earnings threshold, which if migrants don’t pass they can’t access to benefits such as income support. • Not allowing newly arrived EU jobseekers to claim housing benefit. • Removing people who are not here to work and are begging or sleeping rough. They will be barred from re-entry for 12 months, unless they can prove they have a proper reason to be here, such as a job. • Clamping down on those who employ people below the minimum wage with a fine of up to £20,000 for every underpaid employee – more than four times the fine today. This is what we can legally do within the limits of the treaties Labour signed up to. But we believe it is time for a new settlement which recognises that although free movement is a central principle of the EU, it cannot be an unqualified one. So, as part of our plan to reform the EU, we will work with others to return the concept of free movement to a more sensible basis. We will then let Britain decide by putting that reformed Europe to the British people in an in-out referendum.
Posted on: Wed, 27 Nov 2013 12:12:32 +0000
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