Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many claimants of Maternity Allowance who earn below the lower earnings limit were (a) self-employed and (b) recently left employment in the last 12 months for which data is available.

The Lower Earnings Limit per week in the period of 6 July 2022 to 5 April 2023 was £123. Guidance on National Insurance contributions are published here.

You can get Maternity Allowance for 39 weeks if in the 66 weeks before your baby is due, you have been employed or registered as self-employed for at least 26 weeks. Maternity Allowance eligibility is published here.

Maternity Allowance data is published on a quarterly basis and includes data on employment status. The latest release is for June to August 2022. Maternity Allowance statistics for May 2022 was not published as planned due to a data production error. Thereby, data from the last 4 available quarters is reported in Table 1. This is taken from Table 7a of the Maternity Allowance quarterly statistics published here.

Data specific to claimants earning below the Lower Earnings Limit is not available. The data in Table 1 refers to claimants on both the Maternity Allowance Standard Rate or Variable Rate.

Table 1: Number of self-employed, unemployed, and other Maternity Allowance claimants over 4 quarters