NORTH-EAST business leaders have welcomed news that major improvements to the A1 will be set out in the Government’s Autumn statement.

Chief treasury chief secretary Danny Alexander today (Friday, Oct 31) revealed that George Osborne's statement on December 3 would be used to give details of schemes to improve key routes including the A1, the A303 in south west England and the A47.

North East Chamber of Commerce chief executive James Ramsbotham said: “We assume this is to do with dualling the A1 north of Morpeth and picking it up all the way to Scotland, which is something that we have been campaigning for long and hard.

“The fact that we still, in this day and age, don’t have a dual carriageway heading up that part of the country just doesn’t make sense, and we need to do it.”

He added: “Four years ago we put forward a transport strategy saying what our key strategic priorities for the region were and that is the last one to be delivered - so if we got that it would be the full house.

Mr Alexander said the road network had been "really neglected" since the 1970s but "pretty chunky sums of money" had been set out for improvements.

He told The House magazine that the Government would set out detailed plans for routes of "major strategic importance".

"Our road network has been really neglected since the 1970s. You've had 30 or 40 years of nothing much happening," he said.

"We set out some pretty chunky sums of money for the roads, growing over the course of the next Parliament, and I want to fill out for people what we are going to do with that.

"There are six routes which we identified are ones that are of major strategic importance to the country. The A303 is one, the A1 north of Newcastle is another, the A47 is a third.

"We want to fill in some of those gaps, give some more detail, not just objectives but detailed plans for what we can do."

Mr Ramsbotham said: “Scotland is a big market place for us - of six million people – with Edinburgh being our closest capital city and we see a huge amount of trade going north and south on that route.

“We particularly want to encourage more travel from Scotland down to the North-East.

“We know that the Port of Tyne and Newcastle Airport to a large extent the Port of Tees for container traffic are hugely important to Scotland as major exit points to North-West Europe.”

He added: “There is also the ongoing issue of road safety. It is a road that has had a lot of accidents over recent years – so it desperately needs sorting out."