Lord Rosser
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(7 years, 2 months ago)
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Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, I cannot be accountable for what happened in the past. We have been a very, very generous country in terms of letting people come here for the purposes of work. There was a very clear message sent last year about controlling the numbers of people who come into this country from both EU and non-EU countries. That is what we intend to do and we will keep Parliament fully involved in the process.
Lord Rosser (Lab)
On 12 January the Government stated in response to an Oral Question:
“The directive sets out that in order for an EU citizen to reside in another member state beyond three months, they must be exercising a treaty right; that is, working, self-employed, self-sufficient or a student”.
After being asked three times why they did not implement this three-month rule for EU citizens still here without a job, but who were not students, the Government said,
“it is not a failure to implement … This country is more than generous in its implementation of that directive”.—[Official Report, 12/1/17; col. 2059-61.]
First, why do the Government maintain that it is only by leaving the EU that we can reduce EU migration, when they accept that they have not applied the EU directive’s three-month rule as firmly as they could have done, instead considering that they have been “more than generous” in their implementation of that directive? Secondly, how much lower would the net migration figure for EU nationals have been in each of the last five years, had they applied the directive as firmly as they believe they were entitled to do?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, as the noble Lord said we have been a very generous country, and certainly when Labour was in power it decided not to exercise the opt-out the noble Lord asked about. In terms of what the figures would have been had we adopted a different process, we are where we are. The country has given a very, very clear message in the referendum and we intend to follow that through by making sure that net migration to this country is in the tens of thousands.