Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what estimate he has made of the number of people that used self-employed status to avoid paying child maintenance payments in 2017.

The Department has not made an estimate of the volume of declaring self-employment as a means of avoiding child maintenance payments. Income information for paying parents is obtained directly from HMRC. This figure will include earnings from self-employment. Where there is reason to suspect a declared income or that a parent is using self–employment status as a means to avoid or reduce their maintenance liability, the case will be referred to the Financial Investigations Unit. The volume of cases which are subject to a complex earners investigation are published in Table 12 of Child Maintenance Service Statistics available on line at https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/child-maintenance-service-aug-2013-to-dec-2017-experimental. Investigations into self-employed paying parents are a subgroup of the complex earners investigations.