We got tired of being paid late. So we made it our job.

It began with a conversation at a networking event – business owners, accountants and lawyers comparing notes on the same frustration. Everyone in the room was being paid late by someone, and public sector customers were among the worst offenders: the same organisations that make suppliers jump through hoops to win the work, on tight margins, while government talks about cracking down on late payment.

James Ager, an accountant of twenty years, decided to find out how deep the problem went, and began working through the payment records those organisations keep about themselves – their figures, not anecdotes.

The early numbers were startling enough that James took them to Luke Kitchen, an entrepreneur whose businesses had worked with the public sector for years. Nobu Statutory was incorporated that October to do something about it, backed by professionals from the legal, finance and insolvency worlds.

The picture has only grown clearer since: our research now points to around 290,000 businesses owed more than £3 billion in statutory interest and compensation under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998 – money the Act says they’re owed, and almost nobody claims.

That, in a sentence, is why nothing improves. Public bodies measure and report their own payment performance, but the price the law attaches to paying late is so rarely collected that lateness costs them almost nothing – and behaviour that costs nothing doesn’t change. Four years on, changing that is our full-time job – done under our trading name, latepaymentaction.com.

Let’s be honest: we’re a business, like yours, and we expect to make money from this. But the result we’d most like to see is the one that ends us – so we’ll keep making businesses aware of what the law already gives them, and keep collecting it, until the public sector pays on time, every time, and there’s nothing left for us to buy.