Anne-Marie Trevelyan – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Anne-Marie Trevelyan on 2016-04-08.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what modelling she has conducted to assess the likelihood of the emergency brake mechanism to control immigration from the rest of the EU into the UK being utilised in the next five years.

James Brokenshire

The European Commission has clearly said that the UK already meets the criteria for the implementation of the ‘emergency brake’ and the text of the agreement makes clear that, once the necessary legislation is in place, EU workers newly arriving in the UK will not have full access to our in-work benefits for up to four years.

The Home Office accepted the view of the independent Migration Advisory Committee that to produce such estimates "would not be sensible, or helpful to policymakers" and did not prepare specific forecasts of likely inflows from Romania and Bulgaria once restrictions expired on 1 January 2014. There are no plans to undertake a review of this decision.