EU Referendum


EU politics: "benefit tourism" - that report


15/10/2013



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A standing rule of this blog is never to accept at face value any media account of a report – and especially an EU report. Before commenting, it is essential to see the original. So, when the Sunday Telegraph jumped the gun, and published its "take" of a report we had not seen, it obviously left me at a disadvantage. 

Now, the report is available (here), anyone attempting an objective analysis is still at a disadvantage. The report is 282 pages long. It is easy to cherry-pick content to produce lurid headlines and scary copy, but considerably less easy to write an analytical review. 

In passing, one can see certain media techniques at play, in that the Telegraph asserts that there are "more than 600,000 unemployed European Union migrants" living in Britain, and these impose "a cost of £1.5 billion" on the NHS. 

These people, however, cannot and should not be described as "unemployed" – or "jobseekers". Some of them are, but the category is "non-active", which includes school children of 15 years of age and above, students, stay-at-home parents, disabled and pensioners. 

Then, in terms of the cost to the NHS, two estimates are offered – higher and lower. The one is €1.8 billion – translated as £1.5 billion – and the lower estimate is €1.2 billion. The paper ignores the lower figure, without disclosing that it is quoting the higher end of a range.

Another little game played by Telegraph writers, Robert Mendick, and Claire Duffin, is to contrast the "£1.5 billion" cost to the NHS with the estimated cost to France's health system, which they put at "just £3.4 million".

This is a thoroughly dishonest comparison, for one very simple reason. The charging structure of the French health service is totally different from that of the NHS, which is free at the point of use. 

In France, medical services are paid through health insurance, but the point here is that people who would qualify for benefits get their health insurance, the so-called couverture maladie universelle or the Allocation de Solidarité aux Personnes Agées (ASPA), paid for by the state. Thus, the French taxpayer bears the costs, as do British taxpayers, although the costs are allocated in different ways. Mendick and Duffin are comparing chalk and cheese. 

To understand the superficiality of the coverage, one needs to appreciate that, in terms of descriptive prose, the Telegraph uses around 250 words to describe the contents of a report which runs to more than 10,000 words, with dozens of tables, figures and annexes. A comprehensive review is not on offer, and that level of coverage can scarcely do justice to the issue. 

The slight coverage on offer, though, is enough to trigger 1,736 comments (at the time of writing), with many of the respondents even less well informed  â€“ if that is possible – than Mendick and Duffin. Then UKIP - which cannot be any better informed than theTelegraph - piles in with its own comments. 

That said, of course there are issues here. But rather than go to the trouble of reading and analysing a complicated and lengthy report, it would be nice to think that one could rely on the media to give an accurate overview of the content, and to tell us what the report was actually about. 

One certainly gets a different "take" from the loss-making Guardian and from the BBC website, it is so different that one could be forgiven for thinking they are working from an entirely different report that the Telegraph was looking at. 

Courtesy of the state broadcaster, however, we do get to know what the report is about. We are told that a "European Commission study has found that jobless EU migrants make up a very small share of those claiming social benefits in EU member states". On this basis, the Commission wants us to believe that claims about large-scale "benefit tourism" in the EU are exaggerated. 

That really is what the report is about.  It is an attempt by the Commission to defuse the benefits tourism bomb.  It is not about immigration, per se, and not about quantifying levels of unemployed migrants seeking benefits.

Going back to UKIP, we see the party call for a "sensible approach to immigration", which is fair enough, but not actually relevant. Nor is talk about "600,000 unemployed" migrants in the UK. That is not an accurate reflection of anything. And then, using the report as a platform to make policy statements is all very well, but it does not help us with analysing it or understanding what the Commission is trying to say. 

Thinking it through, if we are going to address the issue of migration to the UK from EU member states, what we actually need is something more than this report. We need detail of three scenarios. 

First, we need a baseline – what the situation might have been if we had not joined the EU. Secondly, we need detail of the situation, "as is", only some of which we get from the Commission's report. And the third element would be the detail of the measures we could adopt, within Community law, to minimise the costs of supporting such immigrants as we are required to take in. 

Here, one has to acknowledge that, most probably, even as an independent nation we would have permitted immigration from EU countries, and not simply on a quid-pro-quo, with EU countries permitting British immigration. As a gesture of solidarity, we would have offered places to migrants from central and eastern Europe, after the fall of the USSR.  With or without the EU, we would probably have recruited some Polish plumbers.

It is also important to realise that there are anything up to three million British expats, and many of these benefit from access to the services provided by their adoptive countries. There is an element of reciprocity which must be factored in to any calculations. 

Then, if we are going to have this debate on EU migration, we should evaluate the pros and cons. Our judgement should be on what the lawyers like to call the "balance of convenience". And, if we are gravely disadvantaged – which is likely - then our arguments need to be evidence-based. And that should include an assessment of whether our difficulties are partly of our own making (which is probably the case), as well as the extent of the EU contribution to the problem. 

There we are fated to be disappointed, if we try to extract this information from the report. It simply isn't there. This is an EU-funded propaganda effort. It makes a series of points, the main one being that it had found "little evidence" to suggest that the main motivation of intra-EU migrants was benefit-related as opposed to work or family-related. 

That may suit the European Commission, and it may not be entirely untrue. But it cannot and does not provide comparisons between different scenarios. Thus, unless you are prepared to indulge in selective quoting - the report, as such, is of little use to the anti-EU "community" as an objective tool in the migration debate. It would be remarkable if it was. 

One point that could be made, though, is that – with the exception of a small number of specially commissioned case studies – all the information in the report was in the public domain. Had the eurosceptic "community" been on the ball, we could have written our own version, with a message we wanted to convey. We can't expect the Commission to do our work for us, and that work still need to be done.  

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