Why the Government’s ‘Time To Pay Up’ measures must be more than another failed promise for SMEs 

As the Government announces plans for its toughest crackdown on late payment in over 25 years, Time Finance Chief Executive, Ed Rimmer, shares his views on why the culture of late payment needs to evolve from within for SMEs to truly benefit.  

The UK’s business culture is facing a long-overdue reckoning. For decades, late payments have been treated as an unfortunate but inevitable friction of commerce. In reality, they act as a huge hindrance to growth, stifling innovation and ultimately forcing SMEs that would and should be viable, into unnecessary insolvency. 

The Government’s new measures, Time To Pay Up – hailed the toughest crackdown on late payment in over 25 years – marks a pivotal shift. By mandating rigorous payment disclosures in annual reports and fining those with the poorest payment practices, the onus is finally shifting from small businesses to be a ‘chaser’, to large corporations being the ‘payer’. 

While this is welcome news, SMEs can be forgiven for seeing today’s announcement with a degree of scepticism. We have been here before. From the Prompt Payment Code in 2008 to the Small Business Strategy in 2025, we have seen numerous attempts to reform payment culture, and unfortunately they have fallen on deaf ears, time after time. 

The reality is that previous measures lacked the teeth required to change ingrained corporate behaviours. They often relied on voluntary compliance or lacked meaningful consequences for those who treated small suppliers as interest-free overdrafts. For many business owners, the question remains: is this a genuine structural change, or just another layer of red tape that the biggest offenders will find a way to circumvent?

At Time Finance, we see the ripple effect of payment delays every day. When a business is trapped in a 60 or 90-day invoice cycle, they aren’t just stifling cashflow, they’re putting their future on hold. Recruitment often stalls because the payroll buffer isn’t there, investment stops because capital is locked in someone else’s balance sheet, and resilience weakens as the margin for error disappears, proving the need for these reforms to actually take hold this time around.

SMEs are the key to unlocking the UK’s economic recovery. The Government has also promised SMEs an individual budget and spending target to deliver £7.4 billion a year by 2028. Evidently, Starmer’s Government is on a mission to address the issues SMEs face, and we hope to see his new measures, and powers for the Small Business Commissioner take hold to create a trickle down effect for the business community and its late payment culture.