Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government how many compensation awards were given under section 5A of the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998 in each of the last five years.

The requested information is not held centrally.

As part of the Budget Statement on 18 March 2015, the Government announced that from April 2016 all central government departments and their arm's length bodies will be required to publish, on a quarterly basis, all interest liable under the late payment legislation.

The 2015 Public Contracts Regulations introduced a reporting requirement so that from 2016 contracting authorities will have to publish details of the amount of interest paid due to late payment and from 2017 they will have to publish their liability to interest whether or not paid.