WITH only a month to go before the region decides on whether to set up a directly-elected Assembly for the North-East, campaigners yesterday stepped up a gear in the final push for the referendum.

The first postal votes will be cast in two weeks, with the poll result announced on November 4, and yesterday, with exactly a month to go before the final decision is known, all sides in the campaign launched their latest offensive to win over the hundreds of thousands of voters still to make up their minds on the issue.

North-East Says No used the symbolic date to highlight what they say is a "culture of high salaries, expense accounts and spin", which would accompany the proposed 25-member assembly.

The anti-assembly campaign group said that members of the Scottish, Welsh and London assemblies each claim on average more than £40,000 a year and all three had seen the employment of special advisors. North-East Says No said it expected similar demands from members of any assembly set up in the region.

Chairman John Elliott said: "By creating 25 full-time politicians and a whole load of spin doctors with time on their hands, we will be asking for trouble.

"We will be inviting politicians to create the sort of political culture, with its high salaries, expense accounts and spin, that has made people across the country so disillusioned with modern politics."

Meanwhile, Neil Herron, of North-East No, the Sunderland-based campaign group that is continuing to fight the assembly despite losing the battle to be designated the official opposition in the referendum campaign, focused on the fact that members of the assembly would only sit three days a week.

Mr Herron said: "When the public find out that a sitting assembly member can also be a councillor, MEP or MP as well, they will be even more suspicious of this party political project.

"The queue for seats on the assembly gravy train will stretch from Berwick to Redcar."

But members of the Yes4TheNorthEast campaign accused their rivals of getting their facts wrong. Campaign chairman Professor John Tomaney said: "I'm afraid these figures simply do not add up. The costs of a regional assembly will be 5p per week for the average council taxpayer."

He said that assembly members would not be full-time politicians and that their salaries and costs would, as a result, be considerably less than suggested.

"They also fail to acknowledge that local government reform will lead to a substantial reduction in the number of politicians and significant savings for taxpayers. All in all, this is pretty unconvincing stuff," said Prof Tomaney.

Meanwhile, senior figures from Yes4TheNorthEast were in Middlesbrough yesterday where shooting got under way for the group's film, to be broadcast on TV later this month, extolling the virtues of an assembly.

Opera singer Suzannah Clarke was filmed at the Bottle of Notes landmark, where she said the region had a chance to change the political landscape.

She said: "I have seen first hand the differences between the North and the South, and I believe a regional assembly will give us the opportunity to redress the balance. It's time something happened in this region."

Labour's own Yes campaign gets under way today when Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott arrives for a whistle-stop tour of the region, including appearances in Durham City, Hartlepool and Gateshead.