A great meeting today with roads minister Stephen Hammond. We were both focused on how to bring forward the start and more importantly the finish of the A14 improvements that we so badly need.

It is clear this upgrade is at the very top of the governments agenda. We discussed continuing joint working between the county council, DfT and the Highways Agency which I am very keen on. Our local knowledge of the A14 is very helpful in shaping the plans.

We agreed a plan for concurrent working which hopefully will result in many different tasks being carried out at the same time rather than waiting for each task to finish before starting the next one. This does carry some risk but is likely to accelerate the program.

We talked about our funding summit. We also talked about the production of a plan by the autumn which I am hoping will indicate the A14 upgrade works will start significantly before the current planned date of 2018.