Oral Answers to Questions

Baroness Bray of Coln Excerpts

Monday 10th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Steve Webb]

We are, at the moment, continuing with Labour’s constraints on NEST, and the reason is that those constraints were designed to encourage NEST to focus on low-income savers. It has therefore innovated on, for example, products and on language and has been a good thing. If we think that NEST is unable to achieve the job it is there for, we will change the rules, but the early evidence does not support that.

[Angie Bray (Ealing Central and Acton) (Con)]

5. What recent steps he has taken to prevent benefit tourism.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mr Iain Duncan Smith)]

The European Commission wants to end the habitual residence test. As a result, we would have to pay benefits to EU migrants as and when they arrive and they would not have to prove that they have been here, are working and have a residence. I believe that that is fundamentally wrong, as do the Government. The habitual residence test is vital to protect our benefits system and to stop such benefit tourism. I also do not believe that the EU has any rights in that area, and we are working with other countries that feel much the same.

[Angie Bray]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that answer. Does he agree that any measures that encourage benefit tourism place an intolerable burden on counties, such as ours, that provide generous welfare provision and that we need an agreement across Europe to protect countries from that threat?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

Yes, I agree with my hon. Friend. I referred to working with other countries, and a large number of other member states also have real concerns about the move and believe that they, too, will be affected. Among them are 17 member states, including Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Finland, that attended a conference we held and they all expressed their concern. We are working with them on a set of agreed principles that we will present to the EU, which I hope will end this nonsense.