Before he joined the Conservative Party, he was vice-chairman of investment banking at UBS and a government adviser on welfare reform.

He was educated at Whitgift School, Croydon, and Merton College, Oxford, where he took a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

Effective spending by the [DWP] on labour market policies or administration can result in real reductions in benefit expenditure (and vice versa)[6]In 2008, during the banking crisis that had begun the previous year, Freud became an adviser to Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell and was asked to "help implement nothing less than a revolution in the welfare state" after a "sea change in Labour's thinking about the benefits system".

[12] When the Cameron–Clegg coalition was formed in 2010, Freud was made Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Welfare Reform at the Department for Work and Pensions.

In 2012, he outlined some of his thoughts on welfare reform in an interview by saying: "People who are poorer should be prepared to take the biggest risks, they've got least to lose.

In the same interview, he said his primary concerns were the "nooks and crannies" in the benefits system where people could sit for long periods without ongoing scrutiny.

[4] In 2014, Labour MPs called for Freud's resignation after he was secretly recorded responding to a question posed at a fringe meeting of the Conservative Party conference.

[14] After the Conservatives won the general election in May 2015, Freud was promoted to Minister of State at the DWP, where he was given an enhanced role in overseeing the expansion of the Universal Credit scheme.

[19] Along with the late Martin Gilbert, Freud has acted as a long-term trustee of the Portland Trust, a not-for-profit London-based foundation set up to promote co-operation between Israel and Palestine through economic development.