Prompt Payment Code consultation

Paying suppliers on time matters.  It is particularly important in this pandemic as more businesses than ever are seeing their cashflow squeezed.  Suppliers are people, with their own bills to pay and staff to support.  This is why the Prompt Payment Code (PPC) is one of our 10 components – care for suppliers counts.

The PPC recently moved to sit within the Office of the Small Business Commissioner and the government is now looking at how to strengthen and reform the Code.  There is a consultation on this open to all and we want to encourage you to consider adding your response to their proposals to measure payment over 30 days rather than 60 days for small businesses and consider issues of compliance, small business definition and branding.

We are fully supportive of greater protection for the small businesses and will be interested to learn how they define them.  We wonder why the focus is on 95% of invoices and hope most businesses have systems in place to ensure 100% of their invoices are paid within agreed payment terms (always allowing for human error of course).

In terms of whether a PPC logo would be helpful we argue that the GBC brand encompasses being a signatory to the Prompt Payment Code and we would love to see many more PPC signatories encouraged to go further and sign up to the Good Business Charter to encompass our wider range of responsible business practices.

Do add your voice to the consultation.  The closing date is 16th October.