Responding to the Prime Minister’s statement on the EU renegotiation, Anne Main tells the PM that the deal is not what the British people want as both the ‘emergency brake’ on the payment of in-work benefits to European migrants and the use of the ‘red card’ to block EU laws are dependent on either getting permission from the European Commission or the support of other member states.

Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con): The Commission might agree that we meet the requirements to have a brake, but that is its decision. It might not agree in a few years’ time. Every step of these negotiations relies, unfortunately, on somebody else giving us permission to make decisions for this country, as with the thousands of harmonised directives that we struggle with—day in, day out—in respect of which businesses have to ask the permission of other countries. This is not what the British public want, Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister: Let me deal first with the harmonised directives. We now have this test for subsidiarity—we had only fine words in previous treaties because there was never a mechanism to go with them—so the European Council and the European Commission are going to have to look at all these competences and return to member states those that are no longer necessary. That seems to represent important progress in the area my hon. Friend mentions. On migration, the European Commission has said that Britain qualifies now. Where my hon. Friend is right is that although we know that what is proposed is the ability to stop someone getting full access to benefits for four years, we need to fill in the detail on how long such a mechanism will last and how many times it can be renewed.

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