Tag

The government’s enthusiasm for making public spending savings has resulted in an accusation from the Law Society, the body representing solicitors, that proposed increases in some court fees of up to 600% amount to ‘selling justice’. The proposals from the Ministry of Justice, reports CCR Magazine, mean that fees for claims from £1 to £9,999 are unchanged; from £10,000 to £199,999 are 5% of the claim; and are fixed

All the evidence is that small- and medium-sized companies are still finding it hard to borrow from the traditional source of business capital, the banks, to expand. Now, one of the few global internet businesses that encourages small firms, rather than trying to obliterate or buy up all the competition, has come up with an alternative source of cash. So often, the business plan for digital firms involves emulating A

If I told you that small and medium-sized companies were owed nearly £40 billion as a result of late payments, I think you’d be rightly shocked. But the figure of £39.4 billion comes from the latest research by BACS Payment Schemes, the direct debit company. Such is the scale of the debt burden on SMEs, up from £30bn last year, 60% told BACS they were experiencing late payments with the average company waiting for £3

Blink and you can miss a telling statistic. In this case, it’s a figure published by Sage Pay in January. The payment service provider found that small and medium sized enterprises in the UK are owed more than £55 billion in unpaid or outstanding invoices. That’s a truly shock statistic alongside the finding that 67% of SMEs use paper invoices and spend the equivalent of two weeks a year chasing unpaid invoices. For

A leading debt advice charity published a single figure a few  weeks ago that helps explain why the Bank of England governor, Mark Carney, is casting about for reasons not to increase interest rates when unemployment drops below 7.1%. In what was billed as Debt Awareness Week, the StepChange charity was contacted by new clients who owe a total of £230 million. It’s not clear how many people sought advice on managing