It will roll out a £28bn programme of enhancements and maintenance of national and local roads from 2015 to 2020.

Much of the road spending is back-end loaded with Highways Agency spending rising from £1.5bn in 2015 to £3.8bn in 2020/21.

The Government reaffirmed its pledge to legislate to end the stop-start cycle of investment to provide industry with certainty and turn the Highways Agency into a publicly-owned body.

Chief Secretary Danny Alexander quashed fears that maintenance and pot hole spending would be hit by local government spending cuts.

He said we will take action to fix the backlog of maintenance, which has left road surfaces in communities up and down the country crumbling.

“We are committing £10bn of investment in road repairs between 2015-16 and 2020-21.”

“More than £4bn will be spent on national road maintenance – enough to resurface over 21,000 miles of road; the equivalent of London to Beijing and back.

“The other £6bn of that money will be spent at a local level – allowing local authorities to fill the equivalent of 19 million pot holes a year.”

Together with the national maintenance funding, this investment in repairing the road network will sustain over 11,000 jobs through every year of the next Parliament.

The Treasury has backed all of the major projects in the Highways Agency Pipeline.

And Alexander pledged to bring forward by almost two years to 2016 construction of the £1.5bn A14 scheme between Huntingdon and Cambridge.

The Highways Agency will also start feasibility studies to look at problems and identify potential schemes on the A303 to the south west, the A27 on the south coast, the A1 north of Newcastle, A1 Newcastle-Gateshead Western by-pass, connectivity to Leeds airport and trans-Pennine routes between Sheffield and Manchester