Letter to the UK Department for Business and Trade and the Small Business Commissioner on the late‑payment consultation response

Letter — Circulated

To: The Department for Business and Trade and the Office of the Small Business Commissioner, United Kingdom

From: Harpreet Singh, Chair, Cashflow Council, Reseated; Rapporteur, Cashflow Council

Subject: Letter on the late-payment consultation response

Dear colleagues at the Department for Business and Trade and the Office of the Small Business Commissioner,

We write following publication of the Government’s response to its late-payment consultation on 24 March 2026. We welcome the opportunity to place evidence from small-business owners before the offices responsible for this work, and to ask for a practical route from consultation to changes that suppliers can see in the time it takes to be paid. We do not presume to speak for every small business in the United Kingdom. We offer evidence gathered through a member-led process, with its scope and limits stated below.

Who we are and our mandate

Reseated is a global assembly of small-business owners, organized through seven councils. The Cashflow Council examines payment practices affecting the ability of small suppliers to receive money owed for goods and services. Our members are anonymous unless they choose a public role. Their accounts are not attributed to named businesses, and we do not identify a buyer or supplier in a member’s report.

Reseated launched on 10 February 2026. Its Founders Assembly adopted Rules of Procedure on 19 March 2026. Under those rules, the Council’s work begins with reports from members, proceeds through a five-part pattern test—volume, frequency, consistency, spread and corroboration—and then may lead to a proposed standard, public consultation and an Assembly ballot. The Council’s present evidence is being used to examine the cashflow problem and develop its agenda. This letter is a submission to public authorities, not a claim that a standard has already been adopted or that the evidence establishes a legal finding against any buyer.

Our assembly is small and recent. As of 30 March 2026, it has 312 members in 48 countries and has received 712 reports from 49 countries. The Cashflow Council has 73 members from 29 countries. It has received 166 reports from 35 countries. The fact that reports come from more countries than the Council has members reflects the geographic reach of the reports; it does not mean that we have a representative sample of businesses in those countries.

Evidence available on 30 March 2026

The 166 Cashflow Council reports describe different payment situations. In 137 reports, the situation was identified as a client paying late. In 29, the situation concerned supplier terms. These categories describe the reported situation, not a determination that a contract or law was breached. The reports record a median amount at stake of approximately US$4,402. This is the median reported amount at stake, not an estimate of the total value of late payments in the United Kingdom or in any other jurisdiction.

Reports came from 35 countries. The highest report counts were Canada, 24; the United Kingdom, 20; the United States, 20; India, 12; Spain, 10; Australia, 8; Mexico, 7; and the Philippines, 7. These eight country counts total 108; the other 58 reports came from the remaining countries in the reporting set. The country counts indicate where reports were submitted, not the share of businesses experiencing late payment in each country.

The team-size profile recorded for reports was: “Just me”, 39 per cent; 2–9 people, 41 per cent; 10–49 people, 15 per cent; and 50–249 people, 5 per cent. The categories total 100 per cent. The report intake recorded 116 reports in the 30 days preceding

the 30 March data date. That is an intake count, not a monthly rate projected across the year.

The current summary of the evidence does not provide a sector-by-sector breakdown. We therefore cannot responsibly state how many reports came from, for instance, construction, retail, manufacturing, professional services or hospitality. We will not infer sectors from individual accounts or substitute anecdotes for a counted sector analysis. If the Department or the Office would find sector classification useful, we can discuss whether a future, voluntary and privacy-preserving classification can be added to the evidence process.

The evidence has important limits. Members opt into a global assembly; they are not selected through a probability sample of UK businesses. Reports may reflect the experiences of people motivated to report a payment problem. Counts cannot establish prevalence, the average length of delay, the proportion of invoices paid late, or the economic effect across the UK economy. A reported amount at stake is not necessarily an overdue amount, and a report is not independently adjudicated merely because it is included in our totals. These limits do not make the accounts immaterial. They define what the evidence can support: a consistent record of reported experiences, suitable for identifying questions for policy and for informing further, more structured inquiry.

At the wider level, the United Nations describes micro, small and medium-sized enterprises as approximately 90 per cent of businesses, 60–70 per cent of employment and around 50 per cent of GDP worldwide.[1] Those global figures do not measure the UK late-payment problem. They do underline why payment practices affecting small suppliers merit attention in policy design.

Policy context and purpose of this letter

The Government published its response to the late-payment consultation on 24 March 2026.[2] We write in the context of that response and the continuing work of the Department and the Office. We do not attribute a position to either office beyond the fact of the published consultation response. Nor do we ask you to treat our evidence as a substitute for official data, consultation analysis or legal advice.

We ask instead for a clear public account of what happens next: which measures are under consideration, what evidence will guide them, how implementation will be assessed, and how a small supplier can seek help when payment is overdue or disputed. The distinction between an undisputed invoice and a genuine dispute matters. A system should not reward a buyer for delaying payment through silence, but it should also provide a fair and accessible means to resolve a real dispute about the invoice or the work.

For small businesses, a delay is not only a number of days on a ledger. Cash committed to materials, wages, rent, tax and other suppliers is unavailable while an invoice remains unpaid. A small firm may have little ability to negotiate terms or to challenge a larger customer without risking future work. Our reports are not sufficient to quantify those effects nationally; they are sufficient to show why transparent rules, usable routes to redress and reliable information are policy questions that deserve attention.

Requests

We respectfully ask the Department and the Office to consider the following actions and to respond, where possible, with the office responsible and an indicative timetable.

1. Publish a clear next-steps account. Please identify the proposals or workstreams that will follow the consultation response, the decisions still to be made, and the public process by which affected small suppliers can contribute. Where a proposal is not being taken forward, a concise explanation would help businesses understand the direction of policy and avoid relying on assumptions.

2. Set out the intended payment standard in operational terms. Please clarify how any policy approach will distinguish an undisputed invoice from a genuine dispute; when the payment period begins; what evidence a supplier should retain; and how partial payment, corrected invoices and agreed variations are to be handled. Clear rules should be understandable to a business without a specialist compliance team.

3. Make consequences for late payment predictable and usable. Please explain what routes a supplier can use when a buyer pays late, disputes an invoice without resolution, or repeatedly fails to meet agreed terms. Where interest, remedies or other consequences are available under applicable rules, guidance should explain how a small business can establish eligibility and pursue them without disproportionate cost or administrative burden.

4. Strengthen accessible dispute resolution and guidance. Please set out how the Office of the Small Business Commissioner can assist suppliers, what information is needed to seek help, and how a supplier can be directed to the appropriate process where a matter falls outside the Office’s remit. Guidance should make clear how confidentiality is handled and what a business should expect after raising a concern.

5. Improve public evidence on payment performance. Please consider regular publication of comparable information that enables small suppliers to assess payment practices. Useful reporting would state definitions, coverage, time periods and limitations; distinguish reported or self-declared performance from verified information; and avoid presenting a headline average in a way that hides the distribution of payment times or the experience of smaller suppliers.

6. Measure the effects on small suppliers and review implementation. Please identify how the Government will assess whether policy changes improve actual payment experience, including whether they reduce delays and make redress more accessible. A review should give suppliers and their representative organizations a route to submit evidence, and should publish findings against stated measures rather than relying only on the existence of a new rule or guidance document.

7. Consider the position of the smallest firms in implementation. Please ensure that any reporting, record-keeping or complaint process is proportionate for a business with no dedicated accounts or legal staff. We ask that guidance use plain language and make clear which steps are optional, which are required and what evidence is sufficient.

Offer of anonymized evidence

We offer to provide a structured, anonymized extract from the Cashflow Council’s 166 reports for discussion with the Department and the Office. The extract could include the country and report-count fields, the reported situation categories, the team-size profile and the amount-at-stake summary set out in this letter. Any further fields would be shared only after review for privacy and re-identification risk. We would agree in advance on purpose, access, retention and any conditions on onward use.

We will not provide members’ names or business names. We will not disclose free-text accounts in a form that identifies a member, a customer or a supplier. Where a small number of reports could make an individual or business recognizable, we would aggregate or suppress the relevant detail. We can also explain the intake process and its limitations so that officials do not mistake the dataset for a representative survey or a verified register of legal claims.

If the Department or the Office wishes to proceed, we propose an initial technical discussion with the Cashflow Council Chair and Rapporteur. The purpose would be to agree a safe data specification and identify which questions the records can and cannot answer. We would welcome feedback on any additional fields that could be collected voluntarily in future, including sector, provided that doing so is proportionate and does not expose members or their businesses.

Closing

Small suppliers need to know when they will be paid, what they can do when payment is delayed, and whether the rules apply in practice. The evidence we hold is limited in scope, but it records experiences across countries and includes 20 reports submitted from the United Kingdom. We submit it in a constructive spirit and ask that the next stage of work make the path from policy to practical protection visible.

Annex: Evidence and sources

Internal evidence reference. The figures in this letter are the Cashflow Council dataset as of 30 March 2026: 73 Council members from 29 countries; 166 reports from 35 countries; median amount at stake approximately US$4,402; 137 client-pays-late situations and 29 supplier-terms situations; 116 reports in the preceding 30 days; and the country and team-size counts stated above. The wider assembly totals are 312 members in 48 countries and 712 reports from 49 countries. These figures are reproduced as recorded and are not presented as a representative national survey.

External sources cited.

1. United Nations, Micro-, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises Day: global MSME context.

2. Department for Business and Trade, Late payment consultation: Government response, published 24 March 2026.

Related Reseated records. RC/A/2026/2, Rules of Procedure of the Founders Assembly, 19 March 2026; RC/CF/2026/1, Call for evidence: Cashflow Council agenda item CF-001, 10 February 2026; RC/CF/2026/S.1, evidence submission, 19 March 2026.

Notes and sources

Sources

1. United Nations, Micro-, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises Day
2. Department for Business and Trade, Late payment consultation: Government response