OPINION
Keir Starmer can't possibly justify this (Image: PA)
In Britain today, most people work hard, pay their ever-increasing taxes, and try to do the right thing. In return, they’re told there’s no money. No money to make sure our public services work as they’re supposed to. No money to help pensioners to heat their homes in the winter. But the truth is that billions of pounds every year are being spent on welfare for migrants, many of whom have never contributed, and likely never will.
Take universal credit. It’s supposed to be a safety net for Britons who fall on hard times, and a way to help people back into work. We are a generous country, and most people want to help those in need. But today there are 1.3 million foreign nationals receiving universal credit at the expense of the British taxpayer. That means one in every six people on it isn’t a Briton. The majority of those foreign nationals aren’t even working.
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They’re taking out of the system without paying in, and many will have no history of contribution whatsoever. If we assume that those people are getting the basic adult rate of universal credit, this amounts to a bill of over ￡6 billion a year.
That is enough money to train and hire more than 60,000 new NHS nurses, and it’s more than we spend on the entire prison system.
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And that’s just universal credit. We don’t have access to the full figures on how many migrants are receiving housing benefit, or disability benefits, or child benefit.
The Government doesn’t publish that information. But we do know that the cost of these benefits has exploded in recent years, with 1 in 10 people in the UK now receiving PIP alone.
The majority of that increase likely won’t have been driven by those from abroad. But based on what we know about the number of migrants who claim universal credit, we’re likely to be looking at billions of pounds for foreign nationals, on top of that ￡6 billion universal credit figure.
Indicative figures from March, compiled by my colleague Neil O’Brien, suggest that households with at least one foreign national are claiming nearly ￡1 billion a month.
But why can migrants even access benefits in the first place? For many, it will seem like common sense that state support should only be for citizens, people who’ve either lived here all their lives or who’ve chosen to build their lives here in a permanent, committed way.
Instead, under our current system, after just five years most migrants become eligible for Indefinite Leave To Remain (ILR). Once they have ILR, they can stay indefinitely in the UK and access benefits, social housing and free healthcare.
When millions of people across the country are struggling to get by, this is completely mad, and it must end. We must prioritise the needs of British citizens, and stop spending billions of pounds a year on those who’ve come from abroad.
Our system needs a complete reset. Earlier this year, my Conservative colleagues and I put forward a proposal to remove state support from those with ILR, and to change the eligibility rules, raising the salary threshold and extending the qualifying period from five years to 10.
The new system that we proposed would mean that those who come here must contribute more than they cost over their lifetimes. If somebody is unlikely to pay enough into the system to cover their costs, they must not be allowed to settle here. If they’re already here, and are unlikely to contribute enough, they will need to leave.
And crucially, we made clear that there should be no state support for those on ILR. Britain is a generous country, but we simply cannot afford to keep spending billions of pounds a year on benefits for those who come here from abroad, particularly when so many of those people aren’t even paying into the system.
It was a simple proposal, which would have saved billions of pounds a year and delivered a fairer system that works in the interests of the people who need it most.
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Unfortunately, the Government voted it down, choosing to continue spending that money on foreign nationals, regardless of whether or not those people are paying in.
The British people have never voted for mass unskilled migration, and they’ve certainly never voted to create a system in which billions of pounds a year are spent on foreign nationals who don’t even pay in.
The Government is rightly telling people that we must make tough choices about our public finances, and yet seems happy to keep paying this money. How can that possibly be justified?
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