Business
Emma Jones Marks First Year as UK Eyes Toughest Late Payment Regime
A year into the job, Britain’s Small Business Commissioner is about to be handed real teeth, and she intends to use them.
Emma Jones CBE has marked her first anniversary as the UK’s Small Business Commissioner, capping twelve months of hard campaigning on behalf of the country’s 5.5 million small firms with the prospect of the most far-reaching shake-up of payment law in a generation. Since taking up the role, the Enterprise Nation founder has trained her attention on speeding up payment times, putting digital tools to work for small traders, and protecting the cash flow that keeps the nation’s smallest businesses alive.
The timing is no accident. Her milestone arrives just as the government’s Commercial Payments Bill, also referred to as the Small Business Protections Bill, completes its passage into Parliament. The legislation is designed to give Britain the toughest late payment regime in the G7 and, crucially, to convert the Office of the Small Business Commissioner (OSBC) from a mediation service into a genuine enforcement body with the power to investigate and to fine.
For anyone who has run a small business, the problem it targets needs little explanation. Late payment drains an estimated £11 billion from the economy every year, and the human cost behind that figure is what Jones returns to again and again.
“Having started, scaled, and sold businesses myself, I know first-hand how draining it is to chase the money you have already rightfully earned,” she said, reflecting on her first year. “This year, our small but mighty team has focused heavily on reducing the hours business owners waste on non-productive tasks so they can reinvest that energy back into growth.”
She is blunt about the scale of the drag. “Late payment isn’t just an administrative inconvenience, it is a massive barrier to excelling,” she said. Joint research from the Department for Business and Trade and the OSBC, she noted, shows UK small businesses lose a staggering 133 million hours of staff time every year purely chasing overdue invoices, an average of 86 hours for every affected firm. “This is time stolen directly from product development, training, and expanding operations. As we look to the year ahead, the new legislation represents a monumental shift. It gives us the teeth we need to end this culture of delay and unlock the full potential of our small business community.”
Jones has spent her opening year reshaping how the OSBC reaches and supports small firms. Acting as an independent advocate for micro-businesses and SMEs squeezed by large corporate supply chains, her office has clawed back £1.5 million for small businesses caught out by late payment, building on the Commissioner’s wider track record of recovering money owed to suppliers.
On the digital front, she has published fresh guidance alongside a payment pledge signed by major UK eCommerce marketplaces including eBay, Temu, PayPal and SumUp, and produced AI advice tailored to small firms. Behind the scenes, she has worked closely with the Department for Business and Trade and research partners to lay the groundwork for the incoming Bill, drawing on international best practice to shape it.
Cultural change has been a constant theme. More than 600 businesses across the UK have now signed up to the Fair Payment Code, among them HSBC, Barclays, NatWest, Nationwide, Heathrow Airport, Amey, Kier, AXA, Boeing, BT and Welsh Water. Jones has also grown the office’s social media reach and launched an interview series, ‘Get the money moving’, with leading voices in the fair payment space. In person, she has met more than 5,000 people and run monthly SME Safaris, sending civil servants out to meet founders in their real trading environments.
The year ahead will be defined by readying the business community for the Commercial Payments (Late Payments) Bill now making its way through Parliament. The government has billed the package as the toughest crackdown on late payments in over 25 years, and the detail bears that out.
Under the reforms, the Commissioner will gain powers to investigate the persistent poor payment practices of larger businesses, adjudicate disputes outside the court system, and levy financial penalties on repeat offenders that could run into tens of millions of pounds. The OSBC will also be able to act on anonymous complaints, shielding small suppliers from the threat of corporate retaliation when they speak up.
Two further measures go to the heart of the cash flow problem. Large companies will be capped at a maximum of 60 days’ payment terms when dealing with smaller suppliers, and statutory interest of 8% above the Bank of England base rate will apply automatically to overdue invoices, stripping away a firm’s ability to contract out of late fees. The new powers for the Commissioner were confirmed when the Bill was introduced to Parliament, alongside the wider crackdown on firms that pay late.
Before the legislation takes effect, Jones is focused on keeping the quality of casework and support high, welcoming more firms onto the Fair Payment Code, and exploring a future in which the office covers some of its own costs while positioning the UK as a global leader in the shift to a prompt payment economy.
After a year of persuasion, in other words, the Commissioner is preparing for a year of enforcement. For the 5.5 million small businesses she represents, the difference could be measured in both hours and pounds.
Amy Ingham
Amy is a newly qualified journalist specialising in business journalism at Business Matters with responsibility for news content for what is now the UK’s largest print and online source of current business news.
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A rendering of American Airlines planned Provisions grab-and-go lounge at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport
American Airlines
American Airlines is planning to open a new grab-and-go lounge at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport by the end of this year, its first new facility at the airport in more than four years as it continues its fight for high-paying customers to close a profit gap with Delta Air Lines and United Airlines.
The new lounge, a 3,700-square-foot space, will include a barista bar with hot and iced coffee drinks as well as hot and cold food travelers can grab.
Airlines have been adding more of these short-visit lounges in recent years to give credit card holders and big spenders access to spaces without crowding larger airport clubs. United announced its first in late 2022, for Denver International Airport.
Airlines and credit card companies alike have raised the entry requirements or scaled back on freebies like guest passes to avoid overcrowding.
American opened the first of its grab-and-go lounges, which it calls Provisions, at Charlotte Douglas International Airport in North Carolina, last year.
American operates out of JFK’s Terminal 8, which is shared by its Oneworld Alliance partners, Japan Airlines, Alaska Airlines, British Airways and others.
It has a trio of high-end lounges for business-class travelers, first-class passengers and other frequent flyer elites for long-haul trips, which the airline opened there in 2022. It also operates an Admirals Club there that is used more for lounge membership customers. American hasn’t updated its New York space lately like it has with those in other cities like Chicago and Austin, Texas.
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Albert Anthony is the pen name of a business author on Amazon and his newest book is “How To Pick Stocks: 8 Steps For Long-Term Investing with Fundamental & Technical Analysis,” now available as a 2026 edition paperback and Kindle ebook in several regions including the US, UK, Canada, and Europe. The author is an analyst & contributor for investing platform Seeking Alpha since 2023, where he has nearly 2,000 followers and has covered hundreds of stocks in multiple sectors including banks/financials, REITs, insurance, pharma, and more. He has also written for platforms like Investing dot com, and has taken part in many business conferences includes Bloomberg Adria’s Investment Outlook 2026 as well as Money Motion 2026. Albert Anthony has Croatian-American roots, having grown up in the US and living in the NYC/New Jersey area as well as the Austin Texas area while working in enterprise IT roles at several prominent companies, including a top 10 financial firm. The author earned a B.A. from Drew University, and also completed certifications from Microsoft, CompTIA, and Corporate Finance Institute where he earned the specialization in risk management. He is founder of a boutique equities research firm, Albert Anthony & Company, which is a trade name both in the US and Croatia. Besides his writing and analyst work, the author has been active on camera as well, as a film/TV extra for casting agencies in Croatia/Europe, and also took part in roundtable panel discussions and appeared in several media stories in that region. You can also check out the author’s video content on the Albert Anthony channel on YouTube where he discusses investing topics, @author.albertanthony Please note: The author does not write about non-publicly traded companies, small cap stocks, crypto, or startup CEOs, so any such mail received and pitches from PR agencies will be deleted. Any official mail to the author should be sent to albertanthony.info@gmail.com. *Author Disclaimer: Albert Anthony and Albert Anthony & Co, is a US-based sole proprietorship registered as a trade name in Austin, Texas, and a sole proprietor registered in Croatia. The author nor his company are registered financial advisors and do not provide personalized financial advisory services to clients and do not manage client assets but provide general markets commentary and research as well as actionable insights based on publicly-available data and their own analysis. The author does not sell or market financial products and services, nor is compensated by any company for rating them. The author does not hold any material position in any stock he rates at the time of writing, unless otherwise disclosed. All investment is assumed to be at risk and readers are expected to do their due diligence beyond the scope of this author’s commentary, agreeing to indemnify the author of any liability for potential investment losses.
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Australia’s consumer watchdog has sued Amazon, claiming the tech giant introduced adverts in Prime Video using allegedly unfair contract terms.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) said Amazon had broken consumer protection law by making the unfair contracts with over a million annual subscribers between November 2023 and August 2025.
“Consumers who wanted to avoid ads were left with no choice but to pay more to maintain the service they’d initially signed up for”, ACCC chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb said.
Amazon has been approached for comment.
For more than a decade, Prime Video was a commercial-free streaming offering that was included as part of Amazon’s popular Prime subscription, which is sold as an upgrade on its core delivery service.
Prime became available in Australia in 2018. It started to roll out advertising in the service globally in early 2024.
When Amazon began that year to include ads within Prime Video, it told subscribers in Australia they would need to pay an additional fee each month in order to keep the service free of ads, driving the monthly price up to 12.99 Australian dollars.
At that point, the ACCC said over 850,000 people in Australia had already paid for a year’s worth of Prime service.
“Those subscribers were provided with a degraded, ad-supported Prime Video service for the balance of their prepaid term unless they paid for the ad-free option”, the ACCC added in a filing, external.
The ACCC said Amazon did this by relying on five unfair terms in contracts with over a million customers signed between 1 November 2023 and 18 August 2025.
“Those contracts included five terms permitting [Amazon Australia] to unilaterally make materially adverse changes to its services (including, but not limited to, Prime Video) and the terms governing those services, without any contractual entitlement for subscribers to receive refunds or other meaningful redress,” the ACCC said.
Amazon’s treatment of its users has come under government scrutiny before.
In the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in recent years has taken legal action against Amazon on claims that the company would sign people up for Prime without their consent, external, and then make it difficult for people to cancel a subscription.
The company on Tuesday also agreed to pay an FTC fine, external to resolve claims that it created a “Kafkaesque ordeal” for people who were victims of online shopping fraud.
In the UK, the government has previously investigated Amazon’s method of listing goods for sale, and the proliferation of fake reviews of products.
U.S. Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent joins ‘Fox & Friends’ to discuss America’s economic future, including the benefits of Trump Accounts for families with newborns and the administration’s efforts to lower gas costs amidst concerns over the Iran war.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned gasoline retailers that the Trump administration is “watching” pump prices and expects them to pass lower oil costs on to Americans.
Speaking on “Fox & Friends,” Bessent’s comments came a day after President Donald Trump urged gas stations to lower prices to around $2.50 per gallon following a decline in crude oil prices.
“I would encourage them to be good actors, especially in the 250th anniversary, because we’re watching,” Bessent said Tuesday.
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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent arrived before testifying before the House Ways and Means Committee in the Longworth House Office Building on June 4, 2026, in Washington, D.C. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images / Getty Images)
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Higher fuel costs have squeezed consumers and businesses alike, with some California small business owners saying they’re “working for peanuts” just to keep their doors open. But Bessent said that as crude oil prices decline, he’ll be watching gasoline retailers to ensure savings are passed on to consumers.
As labor and energy costs rise in California, small business owners say minimum wage laws and gas taxes in the Golden State are crippling their operations.
“We’ve got a chart of how quickly the prices went up and how they followed crude, and we’re going to hold them accountable on the other side,” he said, calling Trump’s Truth Social post on the issue “powerful.”
The president wrote on Truth Social earlier this week, “Gasoline Retailers must get their Prices down, IMMEDIATELY!” and added that “They’re too high considering that Oil is now at $68 a Barrel, and heading south.”
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“The Retailers must quickly react to this statement, and do what they know is right — DROP YOUR PRICE FOR OUR GREAT AMERICAN PEOPLE!” he continued. “There will be no gauging, which is totally illegal. If Retailers don’t do this, big problems lie ahead!”
Bessent said stations often benefit when oil prices spike and argued it is now time to provide relief for the public. “They’re making an extra margin there, and they probably had record profits on gasoline retailing. Now it’s time to do something for the American people,” he said.
Fox News Digital’s Greg Wehner contributed to this report.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent discusses declining crude and gasoline prices, a well-supplied oil market, and the impact of the president’s tax policies, including tax refunds and manufacturing construction growth.
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