Go ahead for four major highway schemes and over £300M of extra maintenance investment as part of an additional £1.5Bn for roads was announced yesterday in the Autumn Statement. Additional investment in the current spending review period will be £1Bn Chancellor George Osborne said.

Fastest scheme to start will be on the A1 in the North East to bring the section between Leeming and Barton in North Yorkshire up to motorway standard; construction will begin in 2013 the Highways Agency said. The project was cancelled in the spending review in 2010. An associated scheme at Lobley Hill on Tyne & Wear to provide an alternative route for local traffic in Gateshead will start in 2014. Total Government investment will be £378M.

Two local projects have attracted £157M of central funding. These are a new link between the A5 and M1 near Dunstable north of Luton which will begin construction in 2014. A local developer is contributing £45M and Central Bedfordshire Council £5M to the road project. In Cornwall the county council and Department for Transport are funding dualling of a 4km section of the A30 north of Bodmin between Temple and Carblake.

And at Junction 30 on the M25 at the connection with the A13 which takes traffic to the ports of Tilbury and London Gateway there is another £150M of Government investment promised for a post 2015 construction start to relieve congestion. The junction needs to take into account an additional crossing of the lower Thames, Government said.

Also included in the Chancellor’s calculations were £270M for relieving pinch points and bottlenecks – announced at the Conservative Party conference in October – and an extra £333M for local and national road maintenance.

The maintenance investment was welcomed by Civil Engineering Contractors Association director of external affairs Alasdair Reisner who said: “This money will provide work in the infrastructure sector which can be implemented without delay.”

CIHT welcomed the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement. CIHT Chief Executive Sue Percy said: “Transport infrastructure plays a vital role across the whole spectrum of society and impacts on both economic and social development. A balanced long-term investment programme that focuses on transport infrastructure will retain and create jobs and provide a major catalyst for sustained economic recovery and growth of the nation.”

“The funding and delivery of UK infrastructure needs to change to ensure that the infrastructure necessary for the UK to compete globally is in place, planned and improved over the short, medium and longer term. The National Infrastructure Plan 2011 stated that almost two thirds of expected investment between 2011 and  2015 will be privately funded and the remainder will be either partially or fully publicly funded.”