To accelerate the improvement in payment practices, government policy must support businesses of every size.
On 1 September 2019, an update to central government procurement policy came into force meaning that departments must now consider how good a company is at paying other businesses. This assessment will decide whether businesses can bid for public sector contracts.
It’s the latest in a series of measures the government has introduced to tackle the issue of late payment. In 2017, it became a legal requirement for large firms to report their payment performance data every six months – primarily, this ‘Duty to Report’ shows how many invoices are paid to agreed terms, the average length of time taken to pay an invoice, and how many invoices are paid within 30 and 60 days.
The availability of this data means that public sector procurers now have the evidence with which to make a consistent assessment of payment practices. When the plan to introduce the assessments was announced in
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