Answer from Hansard

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Andrew Western)

I fundamentally disagree with the perspective of the hon. Gentleman on people who have been here for years, made a contribution and paid their taxes, and then require some help back from a state that they have paid into, sometimes for decades. Not only that, the figure that he uses is a complete conflation and a significant overestimation. He shows his ignorance if he does not understand that it is impossible to suggest that that money has all been paid directly to foreign nationals because the figure that he uses is drawn from the total number of households with a foreign national in them, and many of the individual claimants could in fact be British or Irish citizens.