Financial Resilience and Lean Operations

FINANCIAL RESILIENCE AND LEAN OPERATIONS

The thing that lets you earn is the thing that stops you being helped

Written 15 September 2026 – Northampton

It is a Tuesday in February and it is still dark. The van is on the drive with frost across the screen and a tank that froze overnight and will need an hour or two before anything can be done with it.

There are eleven jobs on today. Four will pay on the day. Three will pay within the week. Two will pay eventually, in their own time, and nobody will feel any need to explain why. And two of them you will still be asking about in April, politely, on a Sunday evening, composing a message you rewrite three times because you do not want to sound like you are accusing anybody of anything.

That is not a bad day. That is an ordinary one, and every sole trader reading this recognises it.

The van is the business. It is the tool, the office, the storage, the advertising and the only reason you can reach the work at all. Without it you are a person with some skills and no way of getting to anybody who needs them.

Hold onto that, because it comes back at the end of this article in a way that took us by surprise when we found it. And which we think is one of the more indefensible things in British law.

But the frozen tank is the easy part of the morning, and it is not the part that has cost us most.

WHAT WE ACTUALLY SELL, AND WHY IT IS AWKWARD

Most of our work now comes through a website. A customer creates an account, chooses a service, picks a date, and pays. In advance. Before we have set foot on the property.

That is an ordinary e commerce arrangement. It is also, when you put it together with what we actually do, one of the more structurally awkward things a person can sell in this country.

We sell a weather dependent outdoor service, online, paid for before delivery.

Nothing about that is unusual on its own. Together, it produces a situation where the thing most likely to go wrong is a thing that the mechanism for resolving disputes cannot see at all.

The thing everybody knows and the system does not

We cannot work in heavy rain. Not would rather not. Cannot.

It is not delicacy and it is not an excuse. Pressure washing and soft washing put a person, water and electrical equipment on somebody else's property, frequently at height, frequently on a surface that becomes slippery the moment it is wet.

Working at height in wind is how people are killed in this industry. Trailing a power lead across standing water is how people are electrocuted.

And even where it is survivable, it is pointless. A biocidal treatment applied in rain is washed off the substrate before it has had contact time to do anything at all. The customer would be paying for a chemical application that the weather removes before it can work, and then paying again in eight months when the growth comes back early.

So the honest thing is to move the appointment. That is not us being unreliable. It is the only professional answer available, and any firm that tells you otherwise is either not using electricity, not working at height, or not telling you the truth.

And we should own our own part in this

We are not going to write a section blaming customers without first saying the uncomfortable thing.

There have been periods where we have handled the rebooking badly. Stretches where weather, health and personal circumstances stacked up at once and we were slower to get back to people than we should have been. Customers who were waiting to hear from us, and who had every right to be annoyed about how long that took.

That is a fair criticism and we accept it without qualification. We have rebuilt how we schedule because of it.

It is also not the same thing as failing to provide a service. And it is nowhere near the same thing as fraud.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A BOOKING IS RAINED OFF

Here is the sequence, and it is the reason this article exists.

A job is booked and paid for. The weather makes it unsafe or pointless. We offer another date.

In the overwhelming majority of cases the customer says fine, and we go back, and that is the end of it. Most people understand rain. They live here too.

In a minority of cases, not a tiny one, something else happens. The customer declines the new date. Then declines the one after it. Or simply stops replying, which has the same effect, because we cannot attend a property without an agreed appointment and we will not turn up unannounced at somebody's house.

And then, with no further contact, the money comes back out of the account.

The code is the part that does the damage

When a card payment is reversed, it is reversed under a reason code. A short, standardised description of what is alleged to have happened, selected from a list.

Some codes say the goods or services were not received.

Some say they were not as described.

And some say fraud.

Those are not the same thing, and the difference is not cosmetic. A business with disputes recorded as non delivery has a service problem. A business with disputes recorded as fraud has something that, to every automated system that subsequently touches it, looks like a criminal one.

A customer who declined three appointments and then reversed the payment has not been defrauded. They may feel aggrieved. They may have a genuine complaint about how long we took to get back to them. But the code that gets attached to that is frequently not, the supplier did not deliver. It is a code that reads, in the machinery, as, this business took money and did not intend to provide anything.

And there is no code for what actually happened. There is no reason code for, the supplier attended, the weather prevented it, alternative dates were offered, and the customer would not take one. That is not an oversight anybody needs to explain. The codes were written for retail, where goods either arrive or do not, and nobody designing them was thinking about a man who cannot get on a roof in a gale.

And we have never once been shown what was said

This is the part we find hardest to accept, and it is the part that we think would strike anybody as wrong the moment they understood it.

We have never been shown what a customer actually alleged.

Not a summary. Not a copy of the claim. Not the wording. We are told the outcome.

In a county court, both parties see the claim. That is not a courtesy. It is the foundation of being able to answer one. You cannot defend a position if you do not know what position is being taken against you. The entire architecture of civil justice in this country assumes that the person accused gets to read the accusation.

In a payment dispute, the merchant does not. We set out in the fourth article of this series exactly why that is, what the process legally is, and what the Financial Ombudsman Service itself says about it. Because it is not what most people assume. For here, one consequence only. A business can accumulate a record of disputes coded as fraud without ever having read a single one of the allegations that produced it.

WHAT WE HAVE BEEN TOLD

We have been told, in terms, by more than one payment provider, that if the service was not delivered the customer can have their money back.

Not unless the supplier attended and could not safely work. Not unless alternative dates were offered and declined. Not unless the contract the customer agreed to at the point of sale provides for rescheduling in adverse weather.

Just. If it was not delivered, they can have it back.

Which means, in practical effect, that the terms a customer agreed to when they bought are not part of the assessment. A trader can write clear, fair, lawful terms covering weather and rescheduling, have the customer accept them at checkout, and find that the document plays no visible part in what happens next.

We should be precise about what that is and what it is not, because precision matters more here than heat.

A chargeback is not unlawful. It is not a court, it does not claim to be one, and calling it illegal would be wrong. It is a private dispute process run under the rules of a commercial card network, and those rules are the rules that apply. That is the whole point, and it is the subject of Article Four.

But a private process that produces a public consequence ought to show its working, and this one does not show it to the party it is recorded against.

One provider looked again

Earlier this year one provider reviewed how it had handled our account, apologised for the service we received, and made a goodwill payment of one hundred and fifty pounds.

We are recording that because it happened. We are not presenting it as an admission of anything. A goodwill payment explicitly is not one, and we are not going to pretend otherwise in an article that spends six thousand words insisting on accuracy.

What we will say is that it happened after we set out, in writing and at length, the legal framework we have described across this series. We have formed our own view about why the tone of these conversations changed. We cannot evidence that view, so it stays a view.

AND THEN THE ACCOUNT WENT

Everything above is the ordinary version. This is what happened when it escalated, and it is the reason we now know as much about this subject as we do.

A disputed transaction of twenty two pounds and fifty pence cost us our business bank account.

Not a warning. Not a restriction. Notice of closure, in writing, with a date on it.

It is worth saying what had happened before that, because it is the part that makes the outcome difficult to follow. This was the fifth chargeback this business had seen, and the previous four had all been resolved in our favour. The same category, the same kind of dispute, each time decided the other way, and on at least one occasion with a note of apology for what we had been put through.

Then the fifth one arrived, and the answer was to close the account.

What a business bank account actually is

Somebody outside this will read, account closed, as an inconvenience. It is not.

Without a business account you cannot take card payments. You cannot invoice. You cannot receive a bank transfer under the business name. You cannot pay a supplier, run payroll, or satisfy an accountant. Every single thing described in the first half of this article, the eleven jobs, the four who pay on the day, the two you are still chasing in April, runs through it.

Closing a trading account is not withdrawing a service. It is removing the ability to trade.

And here is the position, from the regulator

We went and checked what protection exists. The answer was worse than we expected, and it comes from the Financial Conduct Authority's own work on account access and closures.

There is no right to a bank account in the United Kingdom.

And this, which is the part that matters to everybody reading who runs something.

Some protections, for example the anti discrimination measures in the Payment Accounts Regulations, do not apply to businesses, charities, political parties and civil society organisations.

The Authority gathered data from banks on closures between July 2022 and June 2023, and found the most common stated reasons were dormancy and concerns about financial crime.

So the position is this. A consumer has some protection. A business has less. And nobody in this country has a right to an account at all.

The part we are least able to get past

We were told, by the person who made the decision, that our business was not trading ethically.

When we asked what qualified them to reach that conclusion, we were told, on a recorded line, that they had no legal training.

And we were told that part of what informed the decision was a review of our online reviews.

We are going to leave the first two there, because they speak for themselves and because we hold the recordings. It is the third that belongs in an article about evidence.

A regulated financial institution made a decision about our business partly on the basis of online reviews.

We devote the third article in this series entirely to what a review distribution actually is. The short version. Peer reviewed work in M I S Quarterly establishes that ratings follow a J shaped curve produced by two self selection biases, and that the mean rating is therefore a biased estimator of quality. Which question mark demonstrated experimentally, on nearly ten thousand participants, that review content changes what people choose even when the underlying product is identical and the price is held constant.

That is a known, published, measured bias. The Competition and Markets Authority has issued guidance on the fair handling of consumer review information. And a firm regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority used that data source to reach a conclusion about a business, without, as far as we were ever told, applying any of it.

Why that might actually matter legally

There is a principle in English contract law that is directly on point, and almost no small business has heard of it.

In Braganza against B P Shipping Limited, two thousand and fifteen, United Kingdom Supreme Court seventeen, the Supreme Court held that where one party to a contract has the power to make a decision or form an opinion affecting the other party's rights, the law implies a term that the discretion must be exercised honestly, in good faith, and not arbitrarily, capriciously or irrationally.

The Court imported the two limbs of the public law rationality test into a private contract. The decision maker must take relevant matters into account and leave irrelevant ones out. And the outcome must not be one that no reasonable decision maker could have reached.

Bank terms generally reserve a right to close an account on notice. That right is real and we are not disputing that it exists.

But Braganza says a contractual discretion is not the same as an unlimited one. And a decision informed by a data source with a published, measured bias is at least arguable as a relevant versus irrelevant matter under the first limb.

We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice. We are saying that the principle exists, that it comes from the Supreme Court, and that the phrase, we can close the account for any reason we like, is a description of a commercial position rather than a complete statement of the law.

But the thing that still stops us is simpler than any of that

There was never a complaint.

Not a complaint that was investigated and dismissed. Not one that was upheld in part. Not one that was ever opened.

No investigation. No final response letter. No eight week position. The answer to a complaint about an account closure was the account closure.

That is the cleanest failure in the whole episode, and it is the only part that does not depend on who was right about the twenty two pounds fifty. A firm has to handle a complaint. That is not a courtesy, it is a regulatory requirement under the Financial Conduct Authority's dispute resolution rules. Ours was answered with a letter giving us a date.

Everything else in this section is arguable. Somebody could reasonably say the bank was entitled to take a commercial view, that five disputes is five disputes, that the terms say what they say. We would disagree, but it is an argument.

Whether a complaint was investigated is not an argument. It either was or it was not.

Where this now stands

The bank in question has since been acquired. We are re establishing the complaint with the acquiring institution, and we expect to take it to the Financial Ombudsman Service.

We are not naming anybody here. Not the bank, not the member of staff, and certainly not the customer, who is a private individual entitled to make a complaint to her own bank and whose name has no business being in an article. The argument is structural and it does not need a target.

We are also not going to pretend this ended well or that we handled every part of it perfectly. Our correspondence at the time was longer, harder and angrier than it needed to be, and some of it was written by a person who had not slept. We would write it differently now, which is most of why this website exists in the form it does.

WHAT WE THINK SHOULD CHANGE

The rest of this article is evidence. This section is opinion, and we are labelling it as such so that nobody mistakes the two.

Nobody is arguing that consumers should lose protection. They should not. The people who need chargeback most are people with no money and no lawyer, and any reform that made it harder for them would be a bad reform.

But we think four things could be true at once.

A dispute should be investigated before it is recorded against a business. Not adjudicated in full. Investigated. A single question to the merchant, before a code is applied, would resolve a great many of these in a sentence.

Both parties should see what is alleged. This is the one we feel most strongly about and it is the cheapest to fix. It costs nothing to show a merchant the words they are being asked to answer.

A code of fraud should require more than a customer selecting it from a dropdown. Non delivery and fraud are different allegations with different consequences, and the distinction should survive contact with the form.

And where somebody makes a claim they know to be untrue, that should be recorded somewhere. As it would be in essentially any other context in which a person makes a false statement to obtain money.

We understand that the last one is the difficult one. Any system that records accusations against consumers needs safeguards that a system recording them against businesses currently does not have, and we would not want it built carelessly. But the present position, where a false claim costs the person making it precisely nothing, and costs the business it is made against a permanent mark, is not a balanced one. And we do not think anybody would design it deliberately.

WHY WE ARE SAYING ALL OF THIS BEFORE YOU BOOK

There is a version of this article that does not exist, in which we keep quiet about all of it and hope for the best.

We are not writing that one, for a reason that is worth stating plainly.

A contract for services is an agreement between two parties. Both of them have obligations. Ours are extensive, and this website documents them at a level of detail that almost nobody in this trade attempts. What goes on the building, at what dilution, in what conditions, with photographs and dates. We are happy to be held to every word of it.

The customer's obligations are much lighter, but they are not nothing. Accepting a reasonable alternative date when the weather makes the work unsafe is one of them.

We are not servants, and saying so is not us being difficult. It is a description of the legal character of the arrangement, which is mutual. A firm that cannot say that out loud has already accepted a relationship in which one party carries all the duty and the other carries none. And in our experience that is the relationship in which everything eventually goes wrong, for both of them.

So we would rather have this conversation here, in public, before anybody spends any money, than afterwards.

If you want a service provider who will turn up in a thunderstorm and put electrical equipment on your wet roof because you have booked that date and you do not want to move it, we are not that firm and we will not become one.

If what you want is somebody who will tell you why the date moved, offer you another one, do the work properly when conditions allow, and put the entire record of it in public afterwards, that is exactly what we do. And we will do it for you the way we have done it for everybody else.

And the thing underneath all of it

We want to put one sentence here as plainly as we can manage, because it is the thing that this entire article, and possibly this entire website, is actually about.

You cannot end somebody's ability to feed their children because it rained on the day of your window clean.

That is not rhetoric. It is the arithmetic of a two person business. A reversed payment is not an inconvenience at this scale. A dispute coded as fraud is not a black mark to be shrugged off. These things land on households, and the household they land on is the same one that pays for the van in the first paragraph of this article.

Every sole trader reading this knows exactly what we mean. Most of them have never been able to say it, because saying it out loud sounds like special pleading, and because a trade that admits it is fragile is a trade that invites people to test how fragile.

We are going to say it anyway. And then spend the rest of this article showing you the numbers underneath it.

THE GAP

A small business is assumed to fail because it was not good enough at the work.

That is almost never what happens.

The most common financial failure in small business is the gap between doing the work and being paid for it. Not an absence of trade. Not incompetence. A timing problem, running continuously, in a business with no buffer to absorb it.

So we went looking for how big that problem actually is in this country.

We found four numbers, and they do not agree.

The Federation of Small Businesses, a membership body which campaigns for small firms on this exact issue, which should be stated every time its figures are used, reported in its policy report Time is Money in March 2023 that on average through 2022, quarter on quarter, fifty two per cent of small businesses experienced late payment.

The Government, publishing alongside its own late payment legislation in 2026, estimates that forty four per cent of invoices are affected.

Research commissioned in July 2025 by the Department for Business and Trade with the Office of the Small Business Commissioner found twenty eight per cent of businesses affected each year.

And a figure of eighty four per cent of small firms reporting being paid late circulates widely without a period or a report attached to it.

Twenty eight to eighty four per cent, for what everybody calls the same problem.

And here is what we found when we looked properly

We should own something here, because we got it wrong first.

Our own research notes carried the Federation's fifty two per cent as a share of invoices. It is not. It is a share of businesses. We copied it across in the wrong unit, and we only caught it because we went back to the report to fetch a link.

And that error turned out to be the whole story.

Two of those four numbers count invoices. Two count businesses. The headlines almost never say which.

A firm that pays ninety nine invoices on time and one late appears in a businesses affected count identically to a firm that pays every single invoice late. Those two facts describe completely different worlds and they produce the same tick in the same box.

So we are publishing all four, with their sources, and we are not going to pick one. Because we do not believe they can be reconciled. They are not measuring the same thing.

It is not a window cleaner's job to audit the national accounts of an economy. What we can do is tell you exactly what each body published, who they are, what they were counting, and where to go and read it. Anybody who hands you a single confident figure for this has either not looked, or has looked and chosen the one that suited them.

WHAT IT ACTUALLY DOES

Set the units aside and look at what the Federation found in its own terms, because those figures are consistent with each other.

Through 2022, on its quarterly average, fifty two per cent of small businesses experienced late payment. Twenty five per cent reported that it had got worse. And thirty seven per cent applied for credit to manage their cashflow.

Read that last one again, because it is the one that matters and it is never the headline.

More than a third of small businesses borrowed money in order to keep operating while waiting to be paid for work they had already completed.

That is not a cashflow inconvenience. That is a transfer. Somebody decided not to pay on the date agreed, and the cost of that decision did not disappear. It moved, to a bank, and the interest on it is being paid by the business that did the work.

The sectors named as worst affected include education, construction, administrative, professional and scientific, transportation, information technology, arts, and human health and social work. Construction is on that list, and so is nearly everything a trade sits next to.

And there is one more finding, which is the one that says most about where this has ended up. Around half of small firms now regard late payment as inevitable, and around sixty per cent say it holds back growth.

Half of the businesses on the receiving end have stopped treating it as a problem to be solved.

The behaviour has been absorbed into the definition of normal trading. That is not a complaint about customers. It is a description of a norm, and a norm is a structural fact rather than a moral one. It means that a small business planning its cash on the assumption that invoices are paid when they are due is planning against a condition that does not exist.

THE RIGHT NOBODY USES

Here is something most people in the trades genuinely do not know.

Every business to business supplier in the United Kingdom already holds a statutory right to charge interest and recover costs on a late invoice. It has existed since 1998.

The Late Payment of Commercial Debts, Interest, Act 1998 provides statutory interest at the Bank of England base rate plus eight per cent. Simple, not compound. Where the purchaser and the supplier are each acting in the course of business.

That eight per cent margin was not picked out of the air. It was set so that a small business could cover the cost of the bank borrowing it had been forced into by the late payment. The law's own design assumes the supplier is financing the purchaser. Parliament worked that out in 1998 and wrote the remedy accordingly.

And under section five A, once that interest begins to run, the supplier is additionally and automatically entitled to a fixed sum. Forty pounds on a debt under a thousand. Seventy pounds between a thousand and ten thousand. A hundred pounds above that. If reasonable recovery costs exceed the fixed sum, the supplier is entitled to the difference as well.

Two things to be clear about, because this is the sort of provision people misapply. It is business to business only. It does not reach a domestic customer. And the base rate moves, so any worked example needs the rate of the day attached to it.

Almost nobody in the trades uses any of it.

And the reason is not legal. It is not that the right is weak, or hedged, or hard to invoke. The right is clean, automatic and unambiguous.

The reason is relational.

A sole trader lives on repeat custom and referral. He does not have a credit control department to be the bad cop. He is the bad cop, and he is also the man who will be back in six weeks to do the gutters, and whose van is parked on a road where the people either side are also customers. Sending somebody an invoice for seventy pounds and eight per cent over base does not feel like exercising a statutory entitlement. It feels like starting a fight with a neighbour.

So the protection sits there, unused, decade after decade.

We are saying that plainly because it identifies the part of this problem that the trade itself owns. We are not telling anybody to start charging it. That is a commercial judgement with real consequences and it is nobody's business but the person making it. We are telling you it is there, because most people in this industry have never been told.

THE REGISTER NOBODY OPENS

There is a second thing sitting in plain sight.

Since 6 April 2017, large companies and large limited liability partnerships have been under a legal duty to report twice a year on their payment practices, policies and performance. Their standard payment terms, their dispute resolution process, whether they offer electronic invoicing and supply chain finance, and whether they belong to any payment code. Reports are due within thirty days of the end of each six month period.

And they must publish it on a public web service, where anybody can search it.

Which means a subcontractor can look up a large client's published payment record before agreeing terms. Not gossip, not a rumour from somebody on a site, not a feeling. A legal filing, made by the company itself, about itself.

The duty applies to firms exceeding the Companies Act medium sized thresholds on the balance sheet dates for the two preceding financial years. So it covers the large clients, which are exactly the ones a small trade has least leverage against.

It has been there for nine years. It is free. It appears nowhere in trade commentary that we can find, and not one person we have ever worked alongside has mentioned it.

AND THE LAW IS ABOUT TO CHANGE

What follows is a Bill, not an Act. It is not law, nothing in it is a current entitlement, and we are not going to write about it as though it were.

The Commercial Payments Bill, House of Lords Bill four of the 2026 to 2027 session, also reported as the Small Business Protections Bill, was introduced in the House of Lords on 19 May 2026. It followed a consultation that ran from 31 July to 23 October 2025 and a government response published on 24 March 2026. If it passes, it is expected to come into force in 2027.

It proposes a hard cap of sixty days on payment terms with strictly limited exemptions, and a stated ambition to reach forty five within five years. It proposes mandatory late payment interest at eight per cent above base. It proposes a right to a fixed sum where a purchaser raises a dispute late or without sufficient information, which is a quiet but significant provision, aimed squarely at the tactic of manufacturing a query to stop the clock. It would prohibit the deduction and withholding of retention payments in construction contracts. And it would give the Small Business Commissioner power to investigate, to adjudicate payment disputes outside the court process, and to fine persistent late payers.

The mandatory interest provision is the one that changes things for this trade, and it is worth understanding why.

The 1998 Act made the interest available. The trade did not use it, for the relational reasons above. Making it automatic removes the decision. And with the decision goes the fear of causing offence by asking. Nobody has to be the bad cop if the interest simply applies.

If it passes, a right the trade has declined to exercise for nearly thirty years stops being a choice.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN IT DOES NOT HOLD

So far this article has described a business under pressure. Now we should describe what happens when the pressure wins, because the two are the same story and almost nobody writes them together.

Citizens Advice publishes its own client debt data. The average debt owed by the people it sees has reached a record nine thousand five hundred pounds. Up twelve per cent in a year, and up sixty three per cent in four years, from under six thousand pounds.

Sixty three per cent in four years is not a caseload growing. It is the same kind of person arriving in a materially worse condition than they would have been four years earlier.

Then the finding that reframes the entire subject. Across January and February 2026, essential bills, rent, mortgage, council tax, energy, water, telecoms and the television licence, made up an average of forty two per cent of total debt. Three thousand nine hundred and ninety one pounds per person.

Forty two per cent of the debt is the cost of existing where you live.

Not credit cards. Not overspending. Not anything a person chose. The category with no discretionary component at all, which cannot be reduced by deciding differently.

StepChange, the largest debt charity in the country, saw over one hundred and sixty thousand people complete first time debt advice in 2025. Around four hundred and fifty a day. Both StepChange and Citizens Advice recorded their debt client numbers hitting a record in March 2026. The main stated reason for debt among StepChange's clients moved from sixteen to eighteen per cent citing cost of living increases between December 2025 and January 2026, ahead of unemployment or redundancy at fifteen per cent, and illness or injury at ten.

And the Institute for Fiscal Studies adds the piece that connects it to buildings, which is our trade's whole subject. Lower income private renters are more likely to live in homes that are hazardous and difficult to heat, in a market where local housing allowances were frozen while rents rose sharply.

We will say one honest paragraph about that and then stop, because it is not our field and sentimentality would cheapen it.

The homes with the worst thermal performance are occupied by the people for whom energy arrears are the largest single share of their debt. The building pathology and the debt profile are the same phenomenon, seen from two ends. A house that cannot be heated affordably is under heated, and a building held below comfortable temperature has colder wall surfaces and a smaller margin before moisture condenses on them. Everything this business knows about damp says the same thing. That is where surface growth starts.

None of which exterior cleaning solves. But it is worth knowing that building condition is not evenly distributed, and that the people living with the worst of it have the least capacity to do anything about it.

AND NOW BACK TO THE VAN

Here is the part we did not expect to find.

When a person's debts become unmanageable in England and Wales, there are three statutory routes out. Bankruptcy. An Individual Voluntary Arrangement. And a Debt Relief Order.

The Debt Relief Order is the cheapest and the least destructive. It is designed for people with low income, few assets and debts they cannot realistically clear. The debt limit was raised to thirty thousand pounds in 2021, further reforms followed in 2024, and the ninety pound administration fee was removed. A change the Insolvency Service found had a significant influence on take up. It is, for a great many ordinary people, the right answer.

The Insolvency Service ran a call for evidence on the whole personal insolvency framework. It is worth pausing on why. The last major review of personal insolvency in this country was carried out by the Cork Committee. In 1982. The framework was built for business failure and now overwhelmingly handles household debt.

Buried in the published summary of responses is this.

Many respondents said that D R Os are often not suitable for sole traders because they may have fluctuating incomes, and the D R O vehicle limit can be particularly problematic for small businesses that need a reliable trading vehicle.

Read that again with the first paragraph of this article in mind.

A self employed tradesman cannot use the cheapest statutory debt solution in the country, because he owns a van.

The vehicle is worth too much to fall inside the limit. The income moves about too much to fit the assessment. And the two things that disqualify him are the two things that make him able to earn at all. A vehicle reliable enough to reach the work, and the variable income that self employment produces by its nature.

So the position is this. Keep the van and you cannot have the relief. Give up the van and you cannot have the work, which means you cannot repay anything, which is how you arrived in the first place.

That is not a hard case at the edge of a policy. It is the ordinary shape of self employment in this country, and the cheapest remedy on the statute book does not fit it.

And it is not us saying so. It is what respondents told the Insolvency Service, in the Government's own published call for evidence.

The rest of that document is worth reading too

Two further things came out of the same exercise and both deserve saying.

Respondents raised Individual Voluntary Arrangements with some force, with calls for them to be substantially overhauled or even removed. The concerns recorded relate to the volume provider market. Misleading or poor advice, mis selling of arrangements, and a lack of transparency about fees.

That is a regulatory finding about a statutory product, published by the Government, recording criticism from the sector. We are not going to editorialise on top of it. It is on the record and it is checkable.

And this, which we did not expect from an insolvency review. It was put to the Service that the word debtor carries negative connotations associated with debtors' prisons, and that the language used across the framework should be reviewed to ensure it is non judgmental.

A government review of personal insolvency concluded that the vocabulary itself may be part of the problem. That is a remarkably humane thing to find in a technical consultation, and it does not get quoted anywhere.

THE THING THAT WAS DESIGNED AND THEN SHELVED

Somebody reading this far might reasonably think the obvious answer is a single binding plan. One arrangement covering every creditor, with protection from enforcement, at a rate the person can actually afford.

That already exists as a policy. It has a name and it has a file number.

It is called a Statutory Debt Repayment Plan. The Treasury consulted on it. The consultation closed on 5 August 2022. Formal responses came in from U K Finance, Citizens Advice, the Finance and Leasing Association and others. The Government published its response in November 2022.

And decided not to lay the regulations.

The future of the plan was parked behind the outcome of the Insolvency Service's review of the personal insolvency framework. The same review that produced the finding about vans.

So it is not accurate to say nobody has proposed this. It went to a full Treasury consultation, drew formal institutional responses, received a published Government response, and was stopped. The correct statement is not that the idea does not exist. It is that it was designed, consulted on, and left on a shelf in November 2022.

What does exist, and it is more generous than most people know

There is one thing in this area that works, and almost nobody we have spoken to in the trades has heard of it.

Under the Debt Respite Scheme Regulations of 2020, a person in problem debt can get a breathing space of up to sixty days. Most enforcement action is paused. Most creditor contact stops. Most interest and charges are frozen. It is accessed through a debt adviser, and it applies to people who live or usually reside in England or Wales.

And there is a second form of it which is considerably stronger.

A mental health crisis breathing space lasts for as long as the person's mental health crisis treatment continues, plus thirty days. No matter how long that treatment lasts. It is started on the evidence of an Approved Mental Health Professional who certifies that the person is receiving crisis treatment.

And there is no limit to the number of times a person can enter one.

An open ended, repeatable statutory freeze on enforcement, contact, interest and charges, triggered by clinical certification. That is a genuinely humane provision, it has been law since 2020, and it is not widely understood.

What it does not do is resolve anything. It stops the clock. The debt is still there when it restarts. The pause exists, and it is generous. The resolution was consulted on and shelved.

WHAT WE TOOK OUT

Our earlier draft of this article carried a figure describing the average small business as holding around twenty seven days of cash.

We could not establish its source. The trail appears to lead to United States small business research, and we could not find a United Kingdom equivalent that stood up to being checked.

So it is gone. An American figure presented as a British one is exactly the fault this series exists to expose, and we were not going to commit it in our own copy because it made a tidy sentence.

A related claim, that only twenty six per cent of United Kingdom small businesses hold more than six months of reserve, widely attributed to the Office for National Statistics in secondary sources, does not appear in any release we could find. Also gone.

Two of the four late payment figures at the top of this article carry caveats we could not resolve, and we have flagged them rather than quietly dropping them. Because a figure published with its weakness attached is more useful to a reader than one published clean or not at all.

WHERE THIS LEAVES US

The Office for National Statistics tracks business survival. Of the businesses born in 2019, ninety three point four per cent survived the first year. Fifty five point nine per cent reached three. Thirty eight point four per cent reached five. And the regional spread is wide, from forty three point five per cent in the South West down to thirty point six per cent in the West Midlands.

Six out of ten are gone inside five years. Most of them were not bad at the work.

Here is what we think the evidence actually shows.

The inflow is unreliable by default rather than occasionally, and half the trade has stopped calling that a problem.

More than a third of small firms borrow to bridge work they have already done, which means the financing cost of somebody else's decision has been passed to the party least able to refuse it.

A statutory right to charge interest and recover costs has existed since 1998, and the trade does not use it. Not because it is weak but because using it feels like a fight.

A public register of large firms' payment performance has existed since 2017, and nobody opens it.

A single binding repayment plan was designed, consulted on and shelved in 2022.

And the cheapest statutory route out of unmanageable debt does not fit a self employed person, because of the vehicle they need in order to work.

That last one is the one we cannot get past.

Everything else in this article is a matter of information not reaching people, which is a solvable problem and the one we spend our time on. But a man who keeps the van cannot be helped, and a man who gives up the van cannot earn. That is not an information gap. That is a framework built in 1982 for a kind of failure that is no longer the kind of failure most people have.

We have been doing this since 2001, and we have been on both sides of a late invoice. The one waiting for the money, and once or twice the one that could not send it on time either. Neither is a moral failing. Both are what happens when the timing of money and the timing of work stop lining up, which in this trade is most weeks.

Lean operations, in the end, does not mean cutting anything. It means understanding that in a business of this size there is no difference between the accounts and the household, no buffer between a bad month and a real one, and no department to absorb a mistake.

The van is the business. And the law has not noticed.

IF ANY OF THIS IS CLOSE TO HOME

This article is not financial or legal advice and we are not qualified to give any.

Free, regulated debt advice is available from StepChange, from Citizens Advice, and from MoneyHelper, which is backed by government. A breathing space is accessed through a debt adviser. The self employed position is more complicated than the standard guidance assumes, for the reasons set out above, and it is worth saying so to whoever you speak to.

Nothing in this article is a reason to delay asking.

SOURCES

Statute and Parliament. Late Payment of Commercial Debts, Interest, Act 1998, section five A. The Rate of Interest Number Two Order 1998. The Late Payment of Commercial Debts Regulations 2013. The Reporting on Payment Practices and Performance Regulations 2017. The Debt Respite Scheme Regulations 2020. All at legislation dot gov dot uk. The Commercial Payments Bill at bills dot parliament dot uk, and House of Lords Library briefing L L N twenty twenty six, zero zero two eight.

Government. Insolvency Service, Review of the personal insolvency framework, summary of responses and next steps. The Treasury, Statutory Debt Repayment Plan government response, November 2022. Department for Business and Trade with the Office of the Small Business Commissioner, Late Payments Research, July 2025. Debt Respite Scheme guidance for creditors and for money advisers. And Office for National Statistics Business Demography.

Regulator. Financial Conduct Authority, Financial Lives. The Authority reports on United Kingdom payment accounts, access and closures, September 2023 and the September 2024 update. And the Authority Dispute Resolution Complaints sourcebook.

Case law. Braganza against B P Shipping Limited, two thousand and fifteen, United Kingdom Supreme Court seventeen.

Charities and membership bodies, each named with its interest stated. The Federation of Small Businesses, a membership body which campaigns on late payment for its members, Time is Money, the Case for Late Payment Reform, March 2023. Citizens Advice debt data. StepChange client statistics. And the Institute for Fiscal Studies on living standards.

Sources and licensing. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence version three point zero. Parliamentary Library material, where quoted, is licensed under the Open Parliament Licence. Quotations from copyright works are used under the quotation exception, section thirty, Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and each is attributed in the text. Figures are reported as published by the named body. Where credible sources disagree, all are given.

Matthew Kenneth McDaid, trading as Shining Windows