THE leader of Worcestershire County Council has pledged to carry on "grinding away" over getting the £70 million needed to dual Carrington Bridge - after sending the Government a key letter over it.

Councillor Adrian Hardman has written to Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin to remind him of the desperate need to enlarge the A4440 bridge.

Your Worcester News can also reveal how the Conservative wants to pull enough cash together to start dualling it by 2020 - soon after the point at which the current £41 million project to widen the rest of the Southern Link Road ends.

The note to Mr McLoughlin, seen by this newspaper, was put together alongside Worcestershire's Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) and calls the bridge dualling "the final and most crucial stage" towards easing congestion in south Worcester.

It also mentions the vital importance it has for the nation's cyber security, saying sites like Malvern Hills Science Park need a better bridge to flourish.

It reads: "This is an essential scheme for Worcestershire, central to our determination to deliver significant economic growth and improve the productivity of the county.

"It would provide better access to the development sites west of Worcester, such as Malvern Hills Science Park which is home to a cluster of cyber businesses QinetiQ and the National Cyber Skills Centre.

"With companies such as Talk Talk still reeling after the recent cyber security breach, it is nationally important that we continue to develop this sector and a number of cyber suppliers to Government are located in the county.

"Phase four of the improvements to the A4440, which is the dualling of the Carrington Road Bridge, is the final and most crucial stage of the programme to increase strategic capacity between Powick Hams and the M5 Junction 7.

"Only by completing the final phase of improvements will the full economic and journey time benefits of the earlier investment be realised."

The structure handles 30,000 vehicles a day and at the moment the work on the rest of the A4440, which will run into 2018/19, will end without making any changes to it due to the high costs.

Councillor Hardman said: "To keep up the work we'd really need something in the region of £5 million or £6 million initially, big engineering projects like this always need a lot.

"Robin Walker's been leading on this in parliament and is very positive, and like all these things you often have to grind away for a number of years before you get there.

"We won't be finishing the current work on the Southern Link Road until around 2020 and what I want to be able to do is ensure we can move onto the Carrington Bridge seamlessly."

In recent months all of south Worcestershire's MPs have been lobbying the Government fiercely on it, and Mr McLoughlin visited the bridge himself in April to look at it.