Small Businesses: Late Payments

Debate between Lord Prior of Brampton and Earl Attlee

Monday 11th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

My Lords, of course I understand that late payment is very serious for many small businesses and cash is very important to them, but we have made very significant progress in this area. In central government, for example, 95% of all commercial debt is settled within seven days and 99% is settled within 30 days. It is true that in some parts of the economy—in construction, for example—payment terms are later. We believe that by bringing forward the Small Business Commissioner and bringing greater transparency to this area, it will get better.

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, is not this a totally flawed economic system, where large businesses are financed by small businesses, although it is large businesses that can easily raise the finance? What are the disadvantages, if any, of moving to a system where all goods and services are paid for by the end of the month following the month of invoice?

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

Industries are very different from each other—the construction industry is very different from the retail business, for example. Waitrose has a scheme whereby it pays small businesses selling goods worth less than £100,000 a year to Waitrose within seven days. Rolls-Royce has a scheme with a time that is longer than that, and Marks & Spencer has a scheme giving special terms for smaller businesses. Some flexibility in this area is not unwarranted.

Economy: Productivity

Debate between Lord Prior of Brampton and Earl Attlee

Wednesday 8th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

The noble Lord makes a good point. The fact is that the productivity of our investment in research in British universities is incredibly high and the output of our top universities is fantastically high by any world standards. He will know as well as I do that we are now committed to raising an extra £2 billion a year in research by 2021, which is a very significant increase. He is also right that even after that increase we are still not investing as much on a per capita basis or on a percentage of GDP basis as some of our biggest competitors—Germany and the US, for example. So we are making good progress but the job is not yet done.

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

Will the Minister say what we are doing to enhance the social status of professional engineers, and can he write to me and say how many professional engineers have received an honour for engineering, as opposed to financial services?

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

My noble friend raises the profound point that culturally in this country we have tended to encourage people more in the humanities than we have in engineering and STEM subjects. Perhaps the country is being run by too many people who have done PPE at Oxford and too few who did engineering at Cambridge—but there we are. On the honours given to people with a background in engineering, I will look into that and write to my noble friend.