FOCUS PAYMENTS
The power is
By Professor Rudi Klein SEC Group CEO and Barrister
A
s I write this, we’re in the midst of a General Election to vote in 646 members of the House of Commons. By the time that this column is published, we’ll know
who has been elected. So, as soon as possible after the poll on 12 December, we should be contacting all our MPs with a simple message: Payment abuse = broken lives + broken buildings. Unless they support legislation to enhance payment security for small
With the dust now settling from the General Election, there’s never been a better time to get hold of your newly-elected MP and pressure them to join the fight against payment abuse
and medium enterprises (SMEs) in construction, the industry will continue on a downward spiral of declining investment in jobs and skills and of falling standards and quality. In contacting new MPs, we should not hold back. They should understand SMEs create the bulk of the industry’s value and the future survival of many of these companies depends on MPs supporting measures to ensure that they are paid.
Te scourge of insolvency Insolvencies in the construction industry are now running at their highest rate since the recession. More than 30,000 SMEs in Carillion’s supply chain lost monies when the company collapsed in January 2018. The Business Select Committee in the House of Commons concluded that Carillion had treated them with “contempt”. Just as I’m writing this, the news is
that Wetheralds, a Leeds-based specialist painting and decorating contractor, has been forced into liquidation by a string of main contractor bad debts. The final blow for this 33-year-old firm
was the loss of £150,000 for work done for the Simons Group, which went into administration in October. This came on top of £911,000 worth of unpaid work for the Shaylor Group, which went into insolvency in the summer. One Wetheralds director said: “We’ve
never seen anything like this. Bigger firms are a law unto themselves – pay less notices and major firms not paying are driving firms out of business.” This is
36 CABLEtalk DECEMBER 2019/JANUARY 2020
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