Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, what assessment he has made of the proportion of invoices his Department paid to small and medium-sized enterprises within five days in (a) the 2021-2022 financial year and (b) each of the last 12 months.

Data on the prompt payment statistics for FCDO pertaining to financial year 2021/22 can be found published at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fcdo-prompt-payment-data-2021-to-2022. Publication of data for financial year 22/23 has been delayed by the implementation of a new Finance system in the second half of 2022, but will be published as soon as it is available. The FCDO aims to pay all valid invoices from all UK suppliers, including small to medium-sized enterprises, as quickly as possible, and as the published statistics show our average success rate in paying invoices within 5 days between April 2021 and March 2022 was circa 95 percent. The Procurement Bill, currently passing through Parliament, will create a simpler and more transparent procurement regime that will further open up public procurement to SMEs.