Kirklees faces ‘worst cuts in living memory’

Kirklees Council leader Coun Mehboob Khan blasted the Government spending cuts, predicting that front line public services, jobs, health and police budgets would suffer.

He warned that ‘a generation of young people are under threat’, while council tax relief for the elderly could also face the axe.

Council chief executive Adrian Lythgo said it was too early to tell how drastic the cuts would be. Senior council figures were locked in meetings yesterday to discuss their impact.

Mr Lythgo said: “Clearly with such a significant percentage of our overall funding being cut, a significant impact on services and a number of cuts to traditional areas of work will now be unavoidable.”

Kirklees has already committed to saving £83m from its budget by 2014/15 and the outcome of the spending review will not alter that.

Three quarters of the council’s £344m revenue budget comes from central government grants. The £30m area based grant is likely to be cut in half by 2013.

Coun Khan said there was a danger that both the capital budget and revenue budget woould be slashed by 50 per cent.

“This has a direct impact on areas such as road safety, schools improvement, adult social care, mental health, local enterprise growth and the list goes on,” he said.

“There is a danger that districts like ours will not recover quickly from this attack on regions.

“The announcement is worse than we believed at the time of the general election.”

The council will scrutinise the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review over the coming weeks before it can say where the axe will fall.

At Wednesday’s full council meeting Coun Khan said: “We cannot look at a reduction of funding of this magnitude without realising that services will have to be cut and jobs will be lost.”

He warned the council may lose around £19m in funding for affordable housing. The budget for Kirklees Neighbourhood Housing is likely to be slashed, as well as putting an end to secure tenancies.

“Kirklees is one of the few councils still handing our pensioners a council tax discount of three per cent for all those who are not receiving tax benefit,” he said.

“This currently costs us £750,000 a year. We need to consider how we can continue this support.”

He painted a bleak future for towns like Dewsbury, Batley and the Spen Valley.

He added: “Decisions taken today threaten a generation of young people, they threaten the prosperity of areas like ours.

“The burden falls on the poorest, not the richest.”