Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what proportion of suppliers to her Department and its agencies and non-departmental public bodies are signatories to the Prompt Payment Code.

A 30 day payment clause is included within Home Office standard long-form Terms and Conditions and is applicable to sub-contractors to Home Office suppliers with contracts above the EU threshold. Please refer to the clause below which is extracted
from Home Office standard long form Terms and Conditions for the provision of services.

1.1 Where the Contractor enters into a sub-contract with a supplier or contractor for the purpose of performing its obligations under the Contract, it shall ensure that a provision is included in such a sub-contract which requires payment to be made of all sums due by the Contractor to the sub-contractor within a specified period not exceeding 30 days from the receipt of a valid invoice.

The Home Office does not monitor whether its suppliers are signatories to the prompt payment code. We do however ask suppliers with a spend above £500,000 if they have a payment policy in place to ensure payment is made within 30 days.

This is monitored via the Corporate Assessment of Environmental, Social and Economic Responsibility (CAESER) assessment tool. CAESER invites suppliers to the Home Office to voluntarily complete the assessment. The tool is used to capture our major contractors corporate social responsibility policies and procedures via an online questionnaire. Home Office contract managers are required to review their supplier(s) report and discuss any areas of risk identified and to work with them to mitigate those risks.

91 suppliers to the Home Office completed the CAESER assessment in 2014. 69 of these suppliers confirmed that they had a policy in place to ensure that suppliers are paid within a maximum of 30 days.