Migrants receive £28m child benefit

The vast majority of the 34,000 children involved live in Poland and have parents who have come to Britain to work following the country's entry into the EU, along with seven other eastern European states, in 2004.

Welfare rules allow migrants working in the UK to claim the benefit, worth £18.10 a week for the first child and £12.10 for younger ones, even if their children are living abroad.

The latest figures, obtained in response to a parliamentary question from Conservative Treasury spokesman Philip Hammond, show that in December last year around 21,000 child benefit awards were being made in respect of 34,000 children.

The total number of claims had soared by 50% since June, when just 14,000 migrant workers were claiming the benefit for children in their home countries.

No details were given of the number of migrants taking up their entitlement to child tax credit.

Of the children, some 31,399 were Polish, with 1,667 from Slovakia, 714 from Lithuania, 255 from Latvia and smaller numbers from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Estonia and Slovenia.

Benefit was also being paid for nine children in Bulgaria and five in Romania, countries which entered the the EU in January 2007 and whose nationals do not have the automatic right to work in the UK.

Mr Hammond said: "There are 3.8 million British children living in poverty. Yet we are sending £28 million of taxpayers' money abroad every year because our benefits system is such a shambles."

Releasing the figures in a parliamentary written reply, Treasury minister Jane Kennedy said that claims for children living abroad amounted to a quarter of one per cent of all child benefit claims.