Year-on-year figures for the number of agreements each month for the first half of 2011 are only marginally greater than half. Some 48,500 agreements were approved in 2011 up to the end of June, down 44% and the value of these deferrals fell from £1.45bn to £860m, down 42%.

Commentators have suggested this reflects a waning interest on the part of the HMRC to continue the business support scheme, exemplified through the HMRC's decision to no longer publish figures on the take-up of the service.

However the tax office maintained that the scheme had not changed in any way. "We haven't changed the criteria, we haven't changed our approach or our interpretation," a spokeswoman told PrintWeek. "The changes in the figures reflect the changes in the economy."

But the figures also show that the numbers of refusals, which while a relatively small proportion compared to arrangements made, have risen for the second quarter of 2011 to 2,970, compared with 2,250 in Q2 2010.

Leonard Curtis Corporate Strategies commercial director Les Gordon said: "You see a lot of publicity about the ‘end of Time to Pay’ but our commercial view is that we don’t see an end to it; it has helped the business community enormously and a lot of Time to Pay arrangements, if they’re put forward sensibly and with a reasoned argument behind them, still have a very high success rate."

PrintWeek's annual investment survey found that significant numbers in the industry are taking part in Time To Pay, although the 10.9% figure for 2011 relfected the decline on 2010's 14.9%.

The spokeswoman insisted that in 95% of cases, businesses successfully carry out deferral arrangements which are typically set out over a three- to 12-month period, although longer-term agreements are available.

And she added that the decision to cease publication of statistics was simply in light of reviewing the justification for the office to spend money on collating data that didn't appear to be in any demand.

However, Gordon did suspect that the office was taking a harder line on applications. "The government on behalf of the Crown are in a bit of a difficult position [because] there are literally billions of pounds out on Time to Pay arrangements and there is an argument that the government would like that money back.

"I think when it was first introduced it was probably too easy for companies to get Time to Pay arrangements. For example they would often give somebody two years to pay the debt back and so people started to jump on that bandwagon and use it as a means of very cheap cashflow finance.

"Now what’s happened is the Crown has woken up and said, we’re still prepared to look at a Time to Pay arrangement, but you need to demonstrate to us a commitment to pay us off over perhaps a shorter period of time – we’re typically seeing six to nine months now as opposed to 12 or 18 months – and we want to see bullet payments."