To ask the Minister for the Economy, in regards to the Newly Self Employed Support Scheme, to detail (i) the total number of applications; (ii) the total number of grants paid out; and (iii) the average number of days from submitting an application to receiving a grant.

As of 1st February 2021, Invest NI had received 2,334 applications under the Newly Self Employed Support Scheme (NSESS), with payments made to 523 applicants (c22%) to a value of £1.8m.

As with other emergency COVID support schemes, the NSESS is an evidence based assessment process. Each application needs to be reviewed and assessed, based on the evidence submitted by the applicant, against the eligibility criteria. This is a vital step in helping to ensure the proper and correct use of public funds. Unfortunately within NSESS, in the vast majority of cases (estimated at between 80%-90% of applications) the initial evidence submitted has not been of a sufficient quality to allow a final decision to be made quickly. This has resulted in multiple interactions, quite regularly 8-10, between the processing team and the applicants to gather together a satisfactory level of evidence on which to base a decision. These multiple interactions understandably greatly increase the length of time it takes to fully process each individual application.

These added difficulties in assessing NSESS applications, in comparison to other emergency COVID grants, is illustrated through a much longer processing timeframe between an application being submitted and an application being paid. For example, whilst on average CRBSS applications are processed within 15 working days, NSESS applications taking on average 29 days to process.

Having engaged extensively with my officials, I can assure you that they are working tirelessly, including allocating additional resources, to process NSESS applications as quickly as possible. I am hopeful that, now payments have commenced, Invest NI can move to accelerate payments as much as possible. I do, however, caution that given the challenges experienced to date with regards to the quality of evidence received, NSESS processing times are likely to be longer than other similar emergency COVID schemes.