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Small Businesses

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on the Statement. I declare an interest as president of the Specialist Engineering Contractors Group, which represents the high-tech, high-quality end of the construction industry. We welcome what has been said about prompt payment, but I think there is another aspect of it which the Government should look at, and that is the policy of retentions whereby major contractors hold on to a proportion of the funds until the whole of a job is completed, regardless of the relevance of a sub-contractor’s role. As a major customer of the construction industry, the Government could do a lot to help that industry if they ended the policy of retentions, certainly for public sector contracts, and put it on the same footing as the prompt-payment promise of 10 days. That would facilitate the construction industry’s supply-chain cash flow in a way that few other things could at this time.