Commercial debt is now exceeding a staggering Ј60 billion, with half (50%) of all trade debts in the business-to-business environment paid late and a fifth (20%) of the 200,000 businesses that extend credit now employing third-party agencies to assist collection and recovery.
The mobile phone sector is now the largest growth sector for debt.
And there's bad news for the government. Some 68% of debt collection companies state that recent bankruptcy reforms will have little or no effect on the ability to collect problem accounts, half are unimpressed with the Woolf reforms, and 65% believe there has been no improvement in debt culture since the introduction of the Late Payment Act.
These are just a few of the startling facts to be found in the first comprehensive study of the UK debt collection industry - a massive survey undertaken by the Credit Management Research Centre at the University of Leeds for the Credit Services Association (CSA).
