Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what estimate he has made of the cost to the public purse of child benefit paid for children who do not reside in the UK; how many such children there were; and in which countries those children resided in the most recent financial year for which data are available.

Total Child Benefit payments in 2018-19 amounted to £11.6 billion. It is estimated that approximately £15 million was paid for children resident in another EEA country or Switzerland. The number of children these payments relate to, broken down by the country they reside in, is provided in Table 1 below.

Table 1: Estimated number of children for whom Child Benefit is received where European Community regulations apply, as at February 2019

Footnote: Figures have been rounded to the nearest 5. Figures under 5 have been suppressed and shown as ‘-’.