It’s here. It’s now. And you’re part of it. It’s the fourth industrial revolution. It gets bundled together as i4.0 because the term is snappy and sounds modern. The driver is the interconnectedness of digital technology. And it is changing the way we live and work.

Government schemes that successfully ensured the money it conjured up from quantitative easing did not just sit in bank vaults but got out into the business community are coming to an end.

They are not exactly finished yet. If you look on the Government website  you will find 173 schemes offering finance, equity, grant or loan support for established businesses and 135 for start-ups. But many are regional, sector or outcome specific and there is a diminishing number of them.

The Regional Growth Funds that have paid deposits of up to 20% on quite a lot of the stone processing equipment bought by the stone industry since 2010 are winding down, and any money they now distribute tends to be as loans, which have to be repaid, rather than grants, which don’t.