Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps her Department is taking to reduce the delay in (a) self-employed and (b) freelance applicants being granted Access to Work payments.

The Access to Work processing team has consistently been achieving its processing performance targets. While some individual cases may take longer to process than others, there is no evidence of any systemic delay in processing applications, including those from self-employed or freelance applicants.

Access to Work has a specialist self-employment team to help self-employed customers with their applications.