How will Sheffield fare in the scramble for Budget billions?

Across the country, our leaders have submitted pitches for money in this week’s Budget.

They think there is a window of opportunity at the beginning of the government’s first term to grab a sizeable slice of cash.

In Sheffield, the tug-of-war for Sheffield University’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre is the big story.

Northern leaders have submitted plans to make it independent, fund it with £750m over seven years and create up to 15 more sites to replicate its success.

University chiefs want to hang on to it and say it already has a growing network of satellites including in Derby, Wales, Preston, the Wirral and South Korea.

All-powerful government adviser Dominic Cummings will probably have the last word - and he’s no fan of big institutions.

Elected mayor Dan Jarvis has submitted a Budget wishlist of his own.

It is all the usual, unglamorous but important stuff like transport, innovation and housing, as well as anti-flooding measures.

It would certainly help ‘level up’ - but will it excite Boris Johnson?

And there is another regional organisation jockeying for cash: the little-known Local Enterprise Partnership.

Comprised of volunteer business people, it sets the region’s economic strategy and decides whether to hand out millions to inward investors like Boeing (£5m) and McLaren (£12m).

It has been working for months on a request for billions to improve skills and boost business and productivity called the Strategic Economic Plan.

But, as it inches towards publication before summer, how can they be sure it will resonate with a government bombarded with dozens of similar asks?

It usually meets in private, but once a year, at the AGM, they let the public and press in.

At the meeting this week, a partner at accountants PwC, who claimed to have a hotline to top people in Whitehall and Westminster, said ‘fairness’ was the new buzzword, not economic development.

He added: “That’s a conversation you need to be having and it’s not what one you are having.”

The LEP was “disconnected” and the strategic plan needed to be owned by local people “not some people sat in a room,” he added.

Ouch.

It would be easy to dismiss such talk, but there’s a lot of competition for government cash. So what should the LEP do now?