Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Bill

Debate between Andrew Gwynne and Gordon Banks

Tuesday 18th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Gordon Banks]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making that valid point. I shall come to that matter later in my speech when I talk about the changes that have happened over recent years, and perhaps decades, and try to illustrate why prompt payment has become so important.

Let me return to what I was saying about people trying to get their payment on time, and whether they win the argument and risk losing the customer in the process. There does not seem to be much incentive for small businesses to utilise their right against late payers, because just 10% of businesses have even considered doing so. I have been in private business all my working life, having set up my own business in 1986. I can tell this House that late payments are the biggest curse small businesses face: people striving, working hard and going out to sell their wares but then struggling to get paid. As I said, that part of the bargain is not being upheld.

[Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend hits the nail on the head, because this is not a small problem for small businesses—it is a big problem. Is he aware of research by BACS showing that 60% of British small businesses have said that late payment is a problem for them?

[Gordon Banks]

Yes, I am aware of that research, and late payment is a major problem. It is not just a transient major problem, but a constant one, week to week. I have lain in bed at night worrying whether the cheque was going to come in so that I could pay the wages of my staff. That is not a position that any business should be put in, and certainly not because of late payments.

A small business, perhaps a new one trying to establish itself, often finds a degree of comfort in dealing with a larger, perhaps household, name in its business sphere. The saying in my sector is, “You know your money is safe with so and so.” It may be safe but it may also be in their bank all the time and not yours.

We also need to consider the credibility that comes from working with such a customer and the possible opportunities, arising from volume increases, for small business suppliers to be able to renegotiate rates from their suppliers. In my experience, those will more often than not be larger companies. So the small business can find itself sandwiched between a large business customer and a large business supplier, perhaps a multinational company, and being strung out at one end and wrung out at the other. These multinational companies, understandably, have strict credit limits and they will be very quick to stop supply if they are not being paid within 30 days. Within a limited period of time they will remove the small business’s credit facilities, so damaging its credit rating, and reducing its access to key products and, in effect, its ability to pay the bill for which the multinational is awaiting payment.

As we know, the reason for late payment in these cases is often that a large customer fails to keep its side of the deal. I wish to draw the House’s attention to an experience I have encountered a number of times, where large multinationals have been pressing for payment within 30 days for a commodity sold by them to my business and yet that commodity has been sold to another division of the same company and it has no intention of paying within 30 days. Even within the same organisation we may have the supplier pressing for payment within 30 days, the product having been sold to another division in the same company as the supplier and yet it not upholding its part of the bargain and being prepared to pay in 30 days—it just strings you out. So the company wants its money in but does not want to pay the money out. That is just not good enough. The current system of being able to charge interest, at the supplier’s instigation, or being able to apply a debt recovery cost is not adequate and we have to improve these experiences.