ROUTINE road repairs may be scrapped and other frontline services stopped in new cuts totalling tens of millions of pounds at Oxfordshire County Council, the Oxford Mail can reveal.

The authority targeted £103m-worth of cuts last year – including losing up to 500 jobs – and last week announced it was getting rid of a quarter of its managers as well.

But yesterday, a source at the county warned it would not be enough and more cuts would have to be identified this year, fundamentally changing the services the council provides.

Every department will be reviewed, as the source said it would only be able to protect what he called “essential” rather than frontline services.

County council leader Keith Mitchell confirmed the bleak outlook, saying nothing was “sacred”.

The council is bracing itself to lose up to 30 per cent of Government funding under the Comprehensive Spending Review in October and the source said: “Even though we are in a better place than most, some people have not grasped what it means.

“For example, we may be reducing the money spent on roads by 50 per cent.

“That might mean that if you drive down a road that is rutted and broken and unpleasant to drive down, we might say we are only concentrating on fixing the potholes that are dangerous on a main A-road. It is only one of the things on the table and may not happen, but there are dozens on the table.

“We made key savings of £103m over five years last year but we have to go a lot faster and further.

“There will be tens of millions on top.”

Councillors and departments will be working in the next four months on where the cuts will hit, but certainty over the county’s finances will only come in late October.

The source added: “We are going to have to have a proper grown-up look at services we provide, with no ring-fencing, and make some tough decisions about what we are going to do or not do.

“It’s going to be the biggest cut to local authority spending since the Second World War.

“We will protect essential services – educating children, protecting the vulnerable and putting out fires – but there’s a lot of other stuff people consider frontline that we have to look at.”

Mr Mitchell said: “I expect the fire service is safe and there will be a debate on safeguarding children as no-one wants a Baby P case.

“Other than that, every single bit of our service, the things people really value, we will have to look hard at and make tough decisions.

“We have to ask with some services ‘do we continue doing it? Is it a statutory service? Do we have to do it?’”

The council’s Unison representative Mark Fysh said: “The scale of the cuts is beyond anything we have seen before.

“You are probably looking at jobs being lost in the thousands, not the hundreds.

“It’s as bad as it can get.”

He said many would be forced to rely on charities or voluntary groups for some services.

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