LONDON: British Prime Minister David Cameron on Wednesday announced plans to halve the time during which EU migrants with no realistic job prospects can claim benefits in the UK.

Cameron unveiled the plans as part of new “Britain first” immigration policies aimed at luring voters away from euroskeptic rivals ahead of next year’s general election.

The reforms mean that legal European Union migrants without clear job prospects will lose out-of-work benefits after three months, rather than the current six months.

“We want an immigration system that puts Britain first,” Cameron said at the site of a dawn raid on illegal migrants in Slough, a town west of London with a large Muslim population.

Cameron said the new changes, which will be introduced in January, show “you cannot expect to come to Britain and get something for nothing.”

His center-right Conservatives want to win back voters who flocked to the anti-EU, anti-immigration UK Independence Party in European parliament elections in May.

EU rules mean that Cameron cannot introduce a cap on migrants from the 28-nation bloc, whose numbers rose to 201,000 in the year ending December 2013, up from 158,000 a year earlier.

But in an article for the Daily Telegraph newspaper, Cameron set out the plan to reduce the amount of time EU migrants can claim unemployment benefits.

The government did not give figures for how many people would be affected, but the Department for Work and Pensions said 121,280 EU nationals were claiming working-age benefits in the UK in February last year, an increase of 56,190 since 2008.