Where is the government’s evidence for “benefit tourism”?

European Union. Photograph by Yanni Koutsomitis

The government frame the EU migration debate in terms of fear, with Romanians and other Europeans coming to the UK to make use of the NHS and to live off benefit payments – but evidence for these claims is notoriously light.

A recent EU report [PDF] claims that jobless EU migrants make up less than 5% of those claiming benefits in most of the member states studied. The study found that only 0.6% of UK residents were made up of EU migrants in households where no-one in the house was employed – around 360,000 people – and this number will include the large number of European students which come to study in the UK for schooling and university.

EU migrants continue to be a NET positive for the UK, with those employed paying more in tax than received by those unemployed according to the EU, with only 38,000 EU migrants found to be claiming jobseekers allowance in 2012.

The government has previously been called out for its lack of evidence to support it harsh rhetoric surrounding EU migration by activists and newspapers, but Jonathan Todd, a spokesman for Employment Commissioner László Andor, told the BBC that the Commission had been asking for this evidence for three years, only to be brushed aside by Downing Street.

The European Commission is looking for facts so that they can re-examine the rules again if there is a problem, an idea continually pushed by the Tory-coalition government, but Downing Street continues to fail to comply, instead preferring to have policy guided by false perceptions.