Credit, Collections & Insolvency News
A Government watchdog set up to tackle late payments has reclaimed less than £800,000 for small businesses since June 2021. The Office of the Small Business Commissioner, launched in December 2017, has recovered £8.5 million owed to small businesses, with £7.8 million retrieved before June 2021. The Commissioner attributed the lower amount recovered to resolving…
Read more
Analysis of the Bank of England’s data on SME lending shows that through the first half of 2023 SMEs saw net lending decrease by £5.3 billion. The research by Ebury has highlighted the urgency with which businesses are now making debt repayments in the aftermath of the various Covid-19 loan schemes and the rising cost…
Read more
The Secretary of State has said that she is committed to tackling late payments, reducing regulatory barriers and boosting exports – harnessing the two halves of her Department, Business and Trade, to focus on small firms following the Federation of Small Businesses’ (FSB) new office opening in Westminster. Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch said…
Read more
Increasing late payments and spiralling running costs are taking their toll on small construction firms, with confidence amongst the sector falling considerably in Q2 2023, from 27.4 to -31.8, according to FSB’s latest Small Business Index. FSB research found that more than a third of small construction firms (39%) experienced an increase in late payments…
Read more
The Government has paid out £7.39bn to settle bad Covid-era loans, with £2.23bn more in arrears and £750m in default. With data showing that the Government paid out £1.2bn to settle pandemic emergency loans that had gone bad in Q2, Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy figures suggest taxpayers could ending up paying £11.5bn…
Read more
Small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) are currently owed an average of £27,214 in late payments1 according to new research from Intuit QuickBooks, as SMBs estimate one in six invoices (17%) with customers or suppliers are overdue. The research found that the problem is growing – more than half (52%) of SMBs agree they have been more affected…
Read more
The Government has been slow to take action to recover losses to error and fraud in Covid 19 grant schemes of over £1 billion according to a report by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) The report found that three years on from the provision of £22.6 billion in business support schemes in the pandemic, the…
Read more
A new YouGov survey shows most MPs want tougher measures to crack down on late payments. The survey commissioned by the UK’s largest accountancy bodies – the Association of Accounting Technicians and the Association of Chartered Accountants – recently found that two-thirds of MPs think the Prompt Payment Code should be made compulsory for organisations…
Read more
Businesses in Wales had 84,451 fewer unpaid invoices on their books in July 2023 than July 2022, according to new research from R3, the UK’s insolvency and restructuring trade body. R3’s analysis of data provided by Creditsafe shows that overdue invoice numbers in Wales have fallen from 233,925 in July 2022 to 149,474 in July…
Read more
Four in ten (38%) small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) are now taking over 90 days to pay their contract staff, according to new research from Sonovate. More than two in five (43%) of SMEs now struggle to pay their contract workers on time as a result of cash flow problems within their businesses. In contrast,…
Read more
Latest research by the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply (CIPS) has found that rules designed to force large companies to reveal how long they take to pay suppliers have failed to improve payment practices. The duty to report legislation, introduced in 2017, has found that the average time it takes a large business to…
Read more
The increase in interest rates will make it harder for taxpayers to clear these debts according to latest HMRC analysis. The HMRC says it is seeing more taxpayers getting into debt and the average value of those debts is increasing as the economic situation remains challenging. The majority of tax debt is owed by small…
Read more
New research by UHY Hacker Young has shown that the number of ‘dawn raids’ undertaken by HMRC has increased 36% in the past year, from 458 in 2021/22 to 623 in 2022/23 HMRC ‘dawn raids’ are unannounced searches used to gather evidence for possible prosecution for tax fraud or for furlough fraud (HMRC is responsible…
Read more