Many small businesses fail to survive, mainly as a result of poor management, but also because, compared with almost every other European Community member, Britain offers the least encouraging conditions. But such small businesses are important not only because large businesses grow from small ones, hut also because over half the new jobs in Britain are created by firms employing fewer than 100 staff.

It is not as if Britain is without industrial strength. It is one of the world leaders in the production of microprocessors. Without greater investment and government encouragement it is doubtful whether Britain will hold on to its lead in this area. However, it has already led to the creation of 'hi-tech' industries in three main areas, west of London along the M4 motorway or 'Golden Corridor', the lowlands between Edinburgh and Dundee, nicknamed 'Silicon Glen', and the area between London and Cambridge. In the mid 1980s Silicon Glen was producing 70 per cent of British silicon wafers containing the microchips essential for the new information technology- The Cambridge Science Park, symbolised by its Modernist Schlumberger Building, is the flagship of hi-tech Britain. Beginning in 1969, by 1986 the Park contained 322 hi-tech companies. In the words of a consultant, "The Cambridge phenomenon . represents one of the very few spontaneous growth centres in a national economy that has been depressed for all of a decade."