Small Business Commissioner (Scope and Scheme) Regulations 2017

Baroness Golding Excerpts

Wednesday 6th December 2017 Grand Committee

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I refer to my entry in the register of interests, including my chairmanship of Red Tractor, which helps British branding, including some small businesses, to have their food assured and to sell it into the market.

There was a flurry in the Printed Paper Office this afternoon as some of us sought papers on the Small Business Commissioner. Eventually, we discovered papers entitled “Enterprise”. Of course, small business and enterprise go hand-in-hand. I share a passion for both, as noble Lords may know. It was fantastic to be involved in the passing of the parent legislation for these regulations. I welcome Mr Paul Uppal to his job—I believe he is the new Small Business Commissioner. Perhaps the Minister could kindly tell us a bit about him and why the Secretary of State has appointed him to this vital job for small business. I commend the role of the Federation of Small Businesses in ensuring that the Small Business Commissioner not only is now on the statute book but will be up and running once these regulations have been passed.

While regretting the length of the regulations—although obviously I support them strongly, brevity and simplicity are the most important features of law-making—I am sure that the Minister will keep the regulations and the rules and operation of this important new office under review so that we can ensure that it delivers better payment terms for small businesses in the way we all hope it will.

[Baroness Golding (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome these regulations because they go to show that persistence works. So many people have been asking for something like this for a long time, including myself, and now it has arrived. Considering the amounts of money that will be in dispute, are we going to be able to manage all the work on the kind of funding that will be allocated to the Small Business Commissioner?

[Lord Cope of Berkeley (Con)]

My Lords, I too welcome these regulations and the start of this operation. I also welcome Paul Uppal to his job and wish him the best of good fortune in carrying it out. As my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe said, the application of these regulations goes for quite a few pages, so I hope that the website will be a good deal clearer and shorter so that small businesses can understand them.

Prompt payment or the lack of it has been a stubborn problem over many years and successive Governments. All sorts of things have been done in the past to try to improve the situation, and this is one more. I hope that it works successfully. I hope also that the website will point out that these regulations concern only small businesses not being paid by larger businesses. There is a separate operation known as the Small Business Crown Representative whose job it is to make sure that small businesses are paid by government departments and agencies. I think that the website should cross-reference this point because, as we know from the past, these agencies can sometimes be a problem.

Lastly, I hope that the Explanatory Memorandum is wrong in one respect. It states on page 3:

“There is no impact on business”.


I hope that that is a sort of technical way of explaining that the actual laying down of the details will not have an impact, but that the new role will have a considerable impact on small businesses and indeed on charities and voluntary bodies, which are also covered.