Exportable Benefits

Information is very hard to come by. The Minister may be able to shed more light; he has access to figures that I do not have. I know roughly the number of appeals that have been lodged. We are probably looking in total at between 2,000 and 3,000 cases across the whole European Union and Switzerland. The majority are in France and Spain or Majorca, and there are some in Greece and one or two others dotted around the European Union, but not many. With regard to the sums involved, the Minister is on record, I think, as saying that this situation could lead to a sum rising to £50 million annually. I am not quite sure what the justification for that figure is, so I hope that the Minister will have time to explain to my hon. Friend, the expatriate community and me how those figures are arrived at. However, that is not really the point, is it? The point is that there is a legal requirement on the Government to pay the money. The point is that we are not dealing with people who have come from overseas to the United Kingdom and claim every benefit known to man, or the kind of people who are reported on the front page of the Daily Express today as using the United Kingdom as a social benefits milch cow by obtaining a national insurance number for future benefit use. We are not talking about people like that. We are talking about people who have devoted their entire working lives to the United Kingdom, who have paid their taxes, paid their dues, done everything right, served in the armed forces, given their lives to this country—for this country in some cases—and in retirement have chosen to live somewhere warmer and slightly more comfortable to end their days. Those are the people we are talking about. Those are the people we are damaging. They are not ciphers or numbers—2,000 or 3,000. I do not care if there is only one of them; they deserve what the law says they are entitled to, and that is what the Government—our Government, my Government, the United Kingdom Government—are denying. I am ashamed of that. I want to hear from the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr. Harper), that a Conservative Government will honour their legal undertaking, and ensure that those people receive the money that is due to them or sadly, in some cases, to their estates. It is open to the Minister, even now, to recognise that the Government have acted shamefully and that they are wrong, and to agree this morning that his Department will pay all the money due to those who have had benefits terminated when leaving the UK, and have subsequently submitted fresh claims from the EU country of their current residence. I want to clarify one further issue. For the avoidance of doubt or misunderstanding, and to satisfy the claimants and the European Commission, any such payment, which I believe will have to be made, will have to be backdated to the date of termination or of first claim. The Government can either choose to do that honourably and graciously now, or wait for the European Commission's infringement proceedings to take their course, be taken back to the European Court of Justice—during which time more claimants will die—be ruled against, and then fined and forced to pay. I hope that the Government choose to settle. I said earlier that I could see wriggle room appearing if we did not nail the matter down now, and I shall not settle for back payment to the date of the most recent claim. Those payments should not have been terminated when people left the United Kingdom; they were lawful then. To be fair, the Government did not know that they were lawful then and nor did we, which is why so many people did not appeal at the time. We now know, however, that they were lawful; that is what the European Court of Justice said in its ruling. Any payments made will, therefore, have to be backdated to the date of termination or of first claim. The Government have been caught breaking the law, and they have to pay the bill.