In two days time the focus on Small Businesses and Micro Businesses will hopefully be raised up several notches thanks to the hard work of Hull based Tony Robinson. On Friday the MicroBiz Matters Day will be publicised, however throughout the year Tony persistently promotes the case for small and micro businesses to be paid within 30 days of the work they do. This is an argument that has been partially accepted by the Government who have this web page which shows the words indicated here. However the Government know that many large businesses totally ignore such a set of criteria and as an example before they went bust Carillion that had been a major contractor for the Government were paying most of their suppliers after 120 days. So the Government which also set up the Prompt Payment Code, an agreement that Carillion had not signed should take the approach that means that any company it awards contracts to should have signed up to the Code. It also means that the Government itself and all of its ‘subsidiaries’ should adopt the same approach. However it has done very little to promote the code and although the numbers of companies who are signed up to it have risen from just under 2000 to 2200 in the last year, the rise has been only modest. The Business I am part of was recently asked by a client to accept a role as a subcontractor of their main building contractor, but when we saw that their payment terms were written down as 42 days, we went back to the client and insisted that when it came to payments that they ensured we were paid more quickly. They agreed to do so by paying us directly. However even they insisted on a retention which breaks the terms of the 30 day arrangement. It is vital for the hard work of Tony Robinson and his MicroBiz Day this Friday to receive a great deal of attention so we can begin to remove some of the barriers that prevent Small and Micro Businesses from growing their businesses in a meaningful way.