I could not agree more. When I tot up in my head the amount of interest that I have paid on a business account for overdrafts incurred because of non-payment by large customers over the years, and when I think of the amount of money that could have been spent on product development, employing new people and growing my business, it is immensely frustrating even now to think of all that wasted money. My hon. Friend is entirely right that in any business in which the process involves the purchase of large capital goods, whether that is in manufacturing or in construction, and the business is dependent on paying its suppliers in order to create an end product, the middle guy is stuffed if he is not paid on time.
The hon. Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (Gordon Banks) referred to the construction industry. That is where my first business was. I was running a small business, largely working for very large multinationals or for the Government, and my suppliers were often small businesses. Sometimes they were larger ones. When a business relies on the good terms of its suppliers in order to satisfy the punitive terms of its customers, that is a wrong place to be. It is, in effect, pushing credit all the way down the line. That is what I find most objectionable about large companies and Government agencies that behave in that way. They are using their supply chain as a bank. The businesses serving as that bank are not large banks; they are, in many cases, small businesses which cannot bear the cost.
A second important aspect of the Bill relates to the disqualification of directors and pre-packs. Too often, in running a small business, I ended up with bad debts because of suppliers who went bust, cleared out their overdue creditors, reinvented themselves the next day with precisely the same shareholders, directors and a whole load of other people who were connected with the previous company, and then suddenly emerged, phoenix-like—in fact, pre-packs are called phoenixes in the business—and ready to trade again. That is an absolute outrage. It goes against all the principles of a decent, liberal market economy. It is fraud.
The two key provisions that will go some way towards helping that situation are those on director disqualification, for which there is a five-year horizon—I hope that the Government will be able to use the provisions within that period—and on pre-packs, also within that period.