Budget 2015—the lay of the land for commercial lawyers

Budget day!

Soon a flurry of analysis will be flooding into the in-boxes of lawyers and businesses throughout the land.

Whilst many tax lawyers have pencilled in an evening of inhaling coffee and fighting the threat of paper cuts as they flick through hundreds of pages of documents from HM Treasury, commercial lawyers shouldn't have too much be concerned about (except for those that work in certain industries such as oil extraction).

That said, as always there are various nuggets of interest for commercial lawyers, so here we go, in no particular order:

• Greater consistency in unit pricing—The government has been working with major supermarkets for some time on making unit pricing clearer (click here for details). It states today that it wants to continue working with them (and consumer organisations) to produce improved guidance to 'support greater consistency in unit pricing on most everyday products to help consumers compare prices'. We await details on this.
• Prompt Payment Code—The government is looking to extend the Prompt Payment Code to cover wider poor payment practices, (for example in relation to the use of supplier lists). For details, check out, for example, the FAQs check out the Prompt Payment Code website.
• Government payment practice—The government has announced that it will bring 'greater transparency to its payment practices' by asking its strategic suppliers to report quarterly on their payment practices from April 2015. It will also ask all central government departments to report quarterly on their payment performance from April 2015.
• Digital currencies—The government announced its intention to apply anti-money laundering regulation to digital currency exchanges in the UK, to 'support innovation