Not ‘who benefits?’ but ‘what benefits?’

In promising changes to the UK’s relationship with the EU, the Conservative Manifesto 2015 talked about tax credits and child benefit and access to social housing.

We will insist that EU migrants who want to claim tax credits and child benefit must live here and contribute to our country for a minimum of four years. This will reduce the financial incentive for lower-paid, lower-skilled workers to come to Britain. We will introduce a new residency requirement for social housing, so that EU migrants cannot even be considered for a council house unless they have been living in an area for at least four years.

When the Prime Minister wrote to Donald Tusk to open the formal negotiations his letter instead referred to in-work benefits and social housing.

But we need to go further to reduce the numbers coming here, As I have said previously, we can reduce the flow coming from within the EU by reducing the draw that our welfare system can exert across Europe. So we have proposed that people coming to Britain for the EU must live here and contribute for four years before they qualify for in-work benefits or social housing.

Now as Child Benefit is not an in-work benefit as such, being paid to people whether they are in work or not, perhaps it had been dropped and the scope of the proposed restriction narrowed. On the other hand, if Child Benefit was still in, then perhaps the scope had been broadened to include other benefits paid to people whether they are in work or not — in particular because Housing Benefit is as much an in-work benefit as Child Benefit, and so could fall within the proposal. But we don’t actually know what detail accompanied the letter so we don’t know what this was intended to mean or was understood to mean. And this is a quite different issue from restricting payment of child benefit for children abroad.

Turning to the set of documents that have come out of the negotiations, the relevant section refers merely to in-work benefits. There is no mention of social housing.

The implementing act would authorise the Member State to limit the access of Union workers newly entering its labour market to in-work benefits for a total period of up to four years from the commencement of employment. The limitation should be graduated, from an initial complete exclusion but gradually increasing access to such benefits to take account of the growing connection of the worker with the labour market of the host Member State.

For this reason, in the absence of further explanation, it isn’t at all clear what’s covered. As above, I don’t think anything can necessarily be inferred about Child Benefit and it might be in and it might be out, but certainly restrictions on access to social housing seem to have disappeared. As the Manifesto included three discrete elements that were to be insisted on, perhaps someone could confirm …

P.S.

I note merely in passing that in the BBC’s report of what has been achieved, Gavin Hewitt says

This doesn’t seem quite right as social housing was specifically mentioned in the formal letter to Tusk that opened negotiations, quoted above, and the day after the big pre-Christmas dinner at which the Prime Minister set out his stall, Michael Fallon told the BBC (reported in the Telegraph)

Perhaps there has been some misunderstanding.