Government is letting small to medium sized businesses down

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“If government won’t act on behalf of businesses, then we will force the issue ourselves. The scandal of late payments cannot continue like this.”- Eazipay Ltd.

An e-petition calling on the government to take much firmer action to help small businesses get paid on time has been launched by leading Direct Debit processing company, Eazipay Ltd.

According to business research by Bacs, small to medium size companies (SMEs) are currently owed over £36 billion in late payments and Eazipay believes that the government is doing next to nothing to protect SMEs from this catastrophic debt burden.

“Time after time government ministers trot out platitudes about how they want to help businesses and yet nothing is actually being done.” says Ron Bradney, Managing Director at Eazipay, adding:

“That’s why we have taken the drastic step of launching this e-petition. We want to force a thorough and open debate in the House of Commons and really turn the spotlight on how damaging late payments are to SMEs and how little the government is actually doing.

“At a time of national austerity when even large High Street companies are going bust, it is a national scandal that SMEs are being starved of cash by customers who have the resources to pay their bills, but cynically choose not to.”

Eazipay has also slammed the government backed Prompt Payment Code as being nothing more than window dressing which allows big companies to look as if they care about paying on time while enforcing payment terms on their suppliers of up to sixty days.

“How companies can claim to be ‘prompt payers’ and sign up to the Code while at the same time keeping their suppliers waiting up to three months to be paid is beyond me,” says Ron adding:

“It’s nothing short of corporate hypocrisy and the Prompt Payment Code is complicit in this. The Prompt Payment Code needs a complete overhaul as it clearly isn’t fit for purpose. It needs to be given real powers to be able to act on behalf of SMEs.

“Why should viable, profitable companies be forced to the wall because their customers won’t pay them? This government claims to be pro-business and pro- growth but is in fact totally impotent when it comes to acting to bring down this scandalous debt mountain and tackle the scourge of late payments head on.”