THE Chancellor of the Exchequer’s next budget is due on March 8.

Mr Hammond is a more cautious chap that his immediate predecessor, George Osborne, most of whose economic gimmicks have already unravelled.

I’m currently involved at Westminster in trying to reverse the last of Osborne’s gaffes – the sale of the highly successful Green Investment Bank to Macquarie, an Australian financial buccaneer that specialises in buying assets cheap and selling them off when the market rises.

Come March 8, East Lothian should be listening carefully to see if Chancellor Hammond has good news regarding the proposed Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Deal. City deals are a UK Treasury scheme offering chunks of capital investment to partnerships of local councils – provided those councils come up with some bright ideas to grow their local economy. Of course, the Treasury’s £2bn honey pot hardly makes up for a decade of austerity, but let’s be positive.

Unfortunately, Scotland has come at the end of the city deal programme. The first wave of deals saw extra cash for big English conurbations like Birmingham and Manchester. Since 2013, a further 18 middle-size English cities have secured funding. The first Scottish city-region to receive any money was Glasgow, while Aberdeen only got on the list last year. You’ve guessed it: the Edinburgh and South East Scotland partnership (including East Lothian) is near the back of the queue.

As part of the overall bid, East Lothian is asking for £45m. This investment will leverage in private sector cash, producing a total project value of £422m for the county. The funding is earmarked for skills training, social housing, and creating a vital innovation park at Queen Margaret University, as the driver of high-tech jobs in East Lothian. That’s a lot of bang for a £45m buck. But there’s a fly in the ointment – two, actually.

First, smaller partners in the deal consortium are having to fight for their share of the potential cash against the pull of Edinburgh. Second, the Tory Government has published a new 'industrial strategy' that – surprise! - prioritises technologies focused on the Oxford-Cambridge corridor and London.

Which means we will have to work hard to secure funding for Queen Margaret’s innovation park – on which East Lothian’s technological future hinges. In the run-up to the Budget, I will be lobbying the Treasury and the Scotland Office hard to secure the full city deal.