Businesses: Debt

Lord Young of Norwood Green Excerpts

Thursday 17th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wilcox]

I am delighted to be able to say that, after two years, government departments are paying their bills on time. We are paying within five days to the main contractor, which then has to make sure that it pays within 30 days to its sub-contractors. We are watching that very carefully.

[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

During a House of Commons debate on late payments on 14 September 2011, the then Business Minister, Ed Davey MP, announced that the Government would transpose the EU directive on late payments,

“into UK law in the first half of 2012, which is earlier than we are required to do”.—[Official Report, Commons, 14/9/11; col. 280WH.]

Can the Minister tell us why we are now talking about some time in 2013, given the Government’s commitment to assisting small and medium-sized enterprises?

[Baroness Wilcox]

It is a long-standing commitment of the Government not to gold-plate European Union legislation by implementing it early. We have confirmed many times our intention to transpose that directive, thereby providing business—especially smaller business—with certainty. We are making sure that it is written as it should be written and in a way that we think it can be enforced. As we know, within the European Community, our problem is that our Anglo-Saxon law here is not necessarily the same law as applies to some of the other countries. Therefore we have to be very careful that what they are going to do is enforceable.