Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, what his Department's policy is on the use of debt collection agencies to collect outstanding payments.

The core Department’s policy is governed by HM Treasury’s ‘Managing Public Money’ guidance. This sets out that public sector organisations should always pursue recovery of debts. In practice there will be both practical and legal limits to how cases should be handled. So each case should be dealt with on its merits. Within BIS, the use of a debt collection agency would only be considered after all other methods of recovery had failed.