Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what support his Department provides to small businesses for the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies.

Through the Industrial Strategy, we are working with UK industry to support small businesses to flourish and grow across the UK. Alongside the government’s Digital Strategy it will provide the conditions to ensure the UK is the best place to start and grow a digital business, trial a new technology, or undertake advanced research.

We are providing support to innovate and adopt through the UK’s R&D Tax Credits scheme: in 2014/15 a total of 20,935 companies, of which over 18,000 were SMEs, claimed £2.45 billion of relief from £21.8 billion of R&D expenditure.

Government has established a network of Catapult Centres to help business commercialise new and emerging technologies in areas where there are large global market opportunities and a critical mass of UK capability to take advantage. This includes the Digital and High Value Manufacturing catapults which are already providing support to business to develop and exploit Industry 4.0 technologies.

Innovate UK funding is supporting development of Industry 4.0 technologies through its competitions. In its recent Manufacturing & Materials competition, Innovate UK has funded 4 projects, all lead by SMEs in the area of Digital Manufacturing, for a total of £2.25m. In addition, Innovate UK has just approved £180k to fund an extension of the Knowledge Transfer Network’s 4Manufacturing initiative until the end of March 2018, to enable manufacturing SMEs and their supply chains become more productive through the adoption of innovative Industry 4.0 technology.

The Challenger Business Programme identifies the barriers to the growth of innovative businesses across the economy; and works collaboratively with businesses, regulators and other partners to remove these. The Programme has already worked directly with over 400 businesses and going forwards we will work with many more.

We have asked Juergen Maier, as part of the Industrial Strategy, to conduct a review to conduct a review of Industrial Digitalisation with a strong focus on how UK SMEs can realise the benefits of Industry4.0 technologies. We look forward to the results of that review over the coming weeks.