David Cameron seeks EU support for new migration curbs

David Cameron has passionately urged other EU leaders to support his "reasonable" proposals for far-reaching curbs on welfare benefits for migrants.

Britain's prime minister said lower EU migration would be a priority in future negotiations on the UK's membership and he said would "rule nothing out" if he did not get the changes he wanted.

Under his plans, migrants will have to wait four years for certain benefits.

But Labour leader Ed Miliband said the PM had "no credibility" on immigration.

In a long-awaited speech in a factory in the West Midlands, Mr Cameron said he was confident that he can change the basis of EU migration into the UK and therefore campaign for the UK to stay in the EU in a future referendum planned for 2017.

But he warned that if the UK's demands fall on "deaf ears" he will "rule nothing out" - the strongest hint to date he could countenance the UK leaving the EU.

The main proposals in the speech - which are dependent on Mr Cameron remaining in power after May's general election - are:

• Stopping EU migrants from claiming in-work benefits, such as tax credits, and getting access to social housing for four years
• Stopping migrants claiming child benefit and tax credits for children living outside the UK
• Removing migrants from the UK after six months if they have not found work
• Restricting the right of migrants to bring family members into the UK
• Stopping EU jobseekers claiming Universal Credit
• Speeding up deportation of convicted criminals
• Longer re-entry bans for beggars and fraudsters removed from the UK
• Stopping citizens from new countries joining the EU from working in the UK until "their economies have "converged more closely" with existing members.

Mr Cameron said migration had benefited the UK, saying he was proud of the "multiracial" nature of modern Britain.

But he said immigration levels in recent years, which he said were the largest in peacetime, had put unsustainable pressure on public services.

He said the UK public's concerns about levels of EU immigration over the past decade are "not outlandish or unreasonable" and the changes will create the "toughest welfare system" for migration in Europe.

"We deserve to be heard and we must be heard," he said. "Here is an issue which matters to the British people and to our future of the European Union.

"The British people will not understand - frankly I will not understand - if a sensible way through cannot be found, which will help settle this country's place in the EU once and for all."

Mr Cameron said he wanted the package to be adopted across the EU, acknowledging that it would need changes to existing treaties, but that if it was not, he would seek a new arrangement applying only to the UK.

'Cap dropped' 

BBC political editor Nick Robinson said Mr Cameron's welfare curbs were "a tougher version of an approach already set out by Labour and the Liberal Democrats" but the proposed four-year limit on benefits would be difficult to negotiate in Brussels.

But he added that ideas of a cap on the numbers coming in had been abandoned amid the realisation he could not get support from other EU leaders for it.

It is a speech which David Cameron and his advisers have agonised over for months.
Ideas for it have been floated in the media, tested in capitals across Europe, debated with civil servants and, no doubt, market tested as well.
What is revealing is not just what has stayed in but what has come out.

Note: 2014 shows provisional rolling quarterly estimates