Mr Smart says the benefits of having a form of income protection need to be explained fully to the self-employed, as it is not just a "nice to have".
He adds: "Without this additional cover allowing them to continue to pay the business bills as well as maintain a decent level of income, they may be forced to wind up their business and so when they recover they may not have a job to go back to. These changes make the level of benefit and support they get whilst ill more relevant to them.
"If you are self-employed, income protection should be seen as a necessity not something that is nice to have, breaking down the barriers to closing sales will help advisers to get their clients the protection they need.”
And those barriers need to be broken down across the industry, says Jamie Smith-Thompson, managing director of Portafina, an advice firm specialising in the self-employed market.
He explains: "If you’re looking for income protection, it is notoriously difficult for the self-employed to prove if they can’t go to work and there’s a lot of exemptions on the policies.
"The best thing to do would be to check the exemptions on these policies and the likelihood of them paying out should you need it - although the cost of such policies may also rule it out as an option."
While the cost might be a potential barrier, for Tom Conner, director at Drewberry, IP is a no-brainer.
"First and foremost, we'd recommend an IP policy. A tiny proportion of self-employed people have IP, yet without sick pay there's very little to stand between a self-employed individual and the breadline.
"There are lots of benefits to working for yourself, but unfortunately a lack of employer-provided sick pay is not one of them. IP is there to pay a proportion of an individual's earnings each month if they can't work due to accident or sickness until they can return to work."
According to Mr Conner, Drewberry often arranges IP for the self-employed with short deferral periods, i.e. less than a month or even as little as one day.
This is to compensate for the fact that many clients who work for themselves do not have sick pay or much in the way of savings to fall back on should they be unable to work.
