Bradford Council’s finance director yesterday painted a bleak future for front-line services in the wake of a £100 million budget cut.

Stuart McKinnon-Evans gave a stark appraisal of the impact the Government’s spending review and other funding losses will have on services in the next three years.

He told the Council’s executive the authority was facing a “collosal task” in finding the estimated 21 per cent of savings needed and that front-line services would inevitably be affected.

Mr McKinnon-Evans said thanks to previous efficiency measures, only £55 million of Bradford Council’s cash was being spent on ‘back office’ support functions each year.

He said: “Even if you were to say, ‘very very aggressively, let’s try to find savings from these functions’, they are simply not large enough.”

Mr McKinnon-Evans said that meant the Council would have to begin a full-scale review into what services it provided and how.

He said: “The Council in 2016/17 will be a very different council to the one it has been in the past.”

Council chief executive Tony Reeves revealed that the authority’s administrative functions had already been reduced by about 40 per cent.

He said the Council had shed 1,500 jobs so far and warned there would be more losses to come.

He said: “There will be some very tough choices to be made.

“It cannot all come from back office, quite frankly.”

Deputy Council leader Councillor Imran Hussain said the latest round of cuts came on the back of around £100 million in savings the Council had already made.

He said in total Bradford Council’s revenue budget would have been cut by almost half, from £450 million a year before the downturn to around £250 million a year by 2016/17.

He said: “Let’s be clear – these cuts are disproportionately hitting northern cities that are actually more deprived and have a greater number of people in need.”

Coun Hussain said the Council would hold “meaningful and proper” public consultations into potential service cuts.

The deputy Council leader also dismissed the idea of using £17 million of unallocated council reserves to “plug the gap”.

Mr McKinnon-Evans said if these reserves were used to pay for services they would last for less than six months and added that they played an important function as the Council could dip into them when it needed without having to borrow money and pay interest.