EU defiant over call for migrants to carry on getting child benefits
BRUSSELS negotiators are refusing to back down over their demand for EU citizens working in Britain to keep their right to claim child benefit for youngsters living overseas, it emerged yesterday.
European migrants should be able to receive the cash even for offspring born after the UK leaves the EU, they insist.
The key demand from Michel Barnier, the European Commission’s chief negotiator, is threatening to become a major stumbling block in the talks over the future relationship between Britain and the bloc.
Mr Barnier’s team is understood to have raised the issue during the first serious round of Brexit discussions in Brussels last week. British officials have offered to maintain current rules allowing continued payments for children of migrants who arrive before the country quits the EU.
But the Government is said to be unwilling to extend that right to children born after the official Brexit date of March 29, 2019.
British taxpayers fund child benefit payments for about 34,000 youngsters living in other EU nations. The overwhelming majority of them live in Poland.
Critics have long called for the payments to be halted.
Former prime minister David Cameron made it a key demand in his attempt to negotiate a new EU deal for Britain but was forced to accept a compromise to reduce the level of payments to that paid in their own countries.
Government sources have accused the EU of “judicial imperialism”.
Branding the current payments “totally unacceptable”, Tory backbencher David Davies said: “I hope the Government’s negotiating team dig their heels in hard on this – it cannot be allowed to go on.”