Late payments have been strangling small businesses for decades — and this week, the Government has finally moved to do something meaningful about it, with Small Business Commissioner Emma Jones CBE leading the charge.
On Monday, the Department for Business and Trade announced what it’s calling the toughest crackdown on late payments in over 25 years. The headline measures include a hard 60-day cap on payment terms for large firms paying smaller suppliers, mandatory interest on late payments pegged at 8% above the Bank of England base rate, and significantly beefed-up powers for the Small Business Commissioner’s office — including the ability to investigate poor payment practices, adjudicate disputes, and levy multi-million-pound fines against the worst offenders.
Alongside many others, this is an issue we’ve been banging the drum on for a long time. When the Government launched its Small Business Plan last year, which laid the ground for this week’s announcement, I didn’t mince my words:
“In a world where online banking, accounting software and e-invoicing exist, it’s completely unacceptable that so many burgeoning startups see their growth stall due to late payments. At its worst, they can send perfectly good businesses to the wall — leaving Britain’s economy less dynamic and competitive.”
The damage goes far beyond individual closures though — late payments are a drag on employment, exports, investment, profitability and access to finance right across the economy.
At Enterprise Nation, which she founded, Emma campaigned for robust measures to address late payments, including in the reports we worked on together. As a Patron of The Entrepreneurs Network, it’s particularly pleasing to see her now in the driving seat to deliver on those shared ambitions. Emma is proving the value of her own longstanding call to get more entrepreneurs into the heart of government to effect exactly the changes we’ve seen this week.
The numbers behind this are stark. Late payments cost the economy an estimated £11 billion a year, and roughly 38 businesses close every single day because they simply aren’t paid on time.
These new powers will allow her to take that work to a much larger scale. As she said:
“We are on a mission to make life easier for small firms by getting money moving faster through the economy by tackling late payments… These reforms will reduce the hours spent chasing debt allowing small businesses to focus on more productive and enjoyable growth.”
There’s also a notable move for construction: the Government is consulting on banning the withholding of retention payments, a practice that has long left smaller contractors exposed when larger firms go bust or simply don’t pay up.
Take a bow, Emma Jones CBE.
Deal Breaker
We’re putting the finishing touches to our response to the Department for Business and Trade’s consultation on refining Britain’s competition regime. Among other things, it proposes reforms to how the Competition and Markets Authority can regulate mergers and giving it new powers to investigate how businesses use algorithms. If any founders or investors want to tell us their perspectives (either anonymously, or loudly and proudly), you can book a 20-minute call with our Research Director Eamonn Ives via this link.
Trust the Process
Our latest UK AI Fieldbook interview is out. Eamonn Ives sat down with Murat Tunaboylu, co-founder of Antiverse, a biotech company using AI to design antibodies against targets that big pharma has struggled with for decades.
The whole conversation is worth reading, but one insight stood out from a policy perspective: the UK’s medicines regulator, the MHRA, appears to be pioneering something genuinely world-leading — process-level drug approvals.
Rather than approving individual molecules one by one, the idea is to approve the process itself, so that everything it produces carries a validated safety and efficacy profile. As Murat puts it:
“Just imagine: you design something, and in a matter of weeks or months it gets to a human patient who has no other option — whereas the current process for getting a drug approved might typically cost $2 billion and take 12 years to complete.”
If it works, it could fundamentally change the economics of personalised medicine — and the UK is leading it. Murat also makes a strong case for open data mandates on publicly funded research, protecting SEIS and EIS, and closing the persistent seed-to-Series A funding gap. Read the full interview here.
Deep Impact
Innovate UK wants to hear from you. As we covered last week, the agency has published a new prospectus under Executive Chair Tom Adeyoola, signalling a major strategic reset — narrowing its focus to deep and hard tech, introducing specialist Growth Sector teams, and building a connected investment pipeline linking its deal flow to the British Business Bank, the National Wealth Fund and the National Security Strategic Investment Fund.
It’s now running a short feedback survey and we’d encourage founders in our network to respond. The more Innovate UK hears directly from the companies it’s trying to back, the better the final model will be.
Branching Out
The Cedar Review — on whose board I sit — has launched its survey on refugee entrepreneurship. The review is gathering evidence on the experiences of refugee entrepreneurs in the UK: what support was available to them, what was helpful and what’s still missing. If you’re a refugee entrepreneur yourself, or you work with or know someone who is, please consider filling in or sharing the survey.
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