Here’s a cheeky, but not-so-little-number to chew on over your cornflakes this morning.  £20,000,000,000 is the size of the enormous financial black hole the in-coming government discovered when the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was handed the keys to Number 11.

Not the kind of mail you want to find on the doormat when you move in. As a result, her first Budget was bound to be more take than give.

But here’s another way at looking at £20 billion. If we improved productivity in the UK’s largest manufacturing sector – food and drink – by just five per cent, we would add an equivalent £20 billion uplift to the national economy.

We’re not saying this would fill the black hole, but it does illustrate the huge gains that can be made if we had a national focus on productivity.

According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, the UK’s public finances watchdog, a half of a percentage point increase in annual productivity growth, say from 1.0% to 1.5%, would result in the government having to borrow around £40 billion less per year.

Here at IntelliAM we are doing our bit, harnessing our unrivalled expertise and experience in the UK’s biggest manufacturing sector, with a deep knowledge of machine learning, to drive step changes in productivity significantly greater than those the OBS says we need to help balance the books and have billions spare to spend on improving our infrastructure – schools, hospitals, public transport.