COUNTY councillors will be lobbied to promote the £30milion A56 bypass as the most important road link for Lancashire.

The controversial scheme, which has been in the pipeline for many years, will link Lancashire to Yorkshire with a new road along the former railway line, bypassing Foulridge, Kelbrook, Earby and Thornton-in-Craven.

Pendle Partnership, the council/business initiative that manages Pendle's single regeneration budget money, has agreed, on tuesday, to lobby Lancashire County Council to push for the road scheme to go-ahead.

Pendle Council chief executive Stephen Barnes said originally the Heysham link was the priority road link and the A56 bypass and a scheme in Ormskirk were joint second.

He said the county council had been told to look again at the Heysham link and consider alternative routes, and he said the Ormskirk scheme was a lot more "low level" than the A56 proposal. Mr Barnes said: "The Government is pushing a lot more money into roads and so the opportunity of getting this scheme approved is increasing. They are thinking about funding more than 100 bypasses in the next ten years.

"We are arguing we have a strategic link in the M65 and then it ends in Colne and traffic is transferred on to unsuitable infrastructure.

"It already splits Colne in two and clogs up the town centre and it is only going to get worse unless we find a solution.

"We want a link with Yorkshire, the Hull ports and the North East. "It may be that Lancashire has not got a major road scheme for the next five or six years, but we could have this scheme completed by that time."

On Tuesday Mr Barnes visited the House of Commons to discuss the scheme with East Lancashire MPs and asked them to back the scheme and lobby LCC.

Mr Barnes said it was important that businesses got behind the scheme to show there was both a transport and economic need for the road scheme and he urged companies to write to the county council.