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Chancellor George Osborne will this week take the axe to police, councils and welfare as he unleashes the most brutal cuts in history.

He will brush aside warnings from police chiefs by pressing ahead with the reductions to their budgets when he unveils his spending review on Wednesday.

Funding to local government, transport and higher education will also be slashed – and experts said the scale of the cuts was unprecedented.

“We have never had anything like it,” said Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies economic think-tank.

Mr Osborne is pushing on with the measures despite being told they may put services such as social care and child protection at risk – and also undermine the fight against terrorism .

The Chancellor, when challenged, did not deny that police numbers could be reduced , saying: “Every public service has to make sure it is spending its money well.”

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Senior police figures, including former Scotland Yard Commissioner Ian Blair, have warned that axing community support officers (PCSOs) will be a disaster because they work with Muslim youngsters who are being radicalised.

Lord Blair said: “National security depends on neighbourhood security and the link between the local and the national is about to be badly damaged.”

He added: “This is the most perilous terrorist threat in our history.

“With their long, successful track record in counter-terrorism, police have adapted well to the changing circumstances and, at the last moment, the very best defences they have built, the neighbourhood teams and the fast and accurate response to multi-site concurrent attacks, are being degraded.

“People die this way and governments fall.”

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Mr Osborne revealed all departments had now signed up to the spending review which will see them have to make cuts of around 30% on average.

The Chancellor is also likely to hit further education and welfare, including housing benefit and the universal credit, in his determination to have a budget surplus by the end of the decade.

Council chiefs warned they would struggle to provide services such as care for the elderly, bin collections, street lighting, social work and pothole repairs.

Town hall spending on key services has already fallen by up to a quarter since David Cameron became Prime Minister in 2010, while expenditure on roads and transport services has dropped 20% in the last five years and education budgets have fallen by 24%.

(Image: Getty Images)

Gary Porter, chairman of the Local Government Association, said: “The ability of councils to provide many of the services people take for granted – such as clean and well-lit streets, maintained parks and access to leisure centres – could become significantly impacted.

“And vital services – such as caring for the elderly, protecting children, collecting bins, filling potholes and maintaining our parks and green spaces – could struggle to continue at current levels.”

Mr Johnson said that by 2020 some departments will have seen their budgets cut by 50%.

Government department cuts 30% Average 50% Possible 2020 target

“If you put these cuts on top of what we saw in the last Parliament, there really isn’t anything to compare,” he said.

“We’ve never had anything like it. The size of the state overall will be roughly where it was at the end of the 1990s, which was a historic low for the post-war period.”

He added: “It’s going to be difficult, and it will be more difficult than it was over the last parliament. For one thing, clearly if there were relatively easy cuts to make they will have been made already.”

Mr Osborne insisted the police cuts would not undermine the fight against terrorism.

He said there would be a 30% increase in the counter-terrorism budget over the next five years , with the money paying for a new M15 base, an expansion of MI6’s global operations, a doubling of expenditure on airport security and the creation of a National Digital Exploitation Service which will decrypt phones and computers seized by the security services.

(Image: Getty)

He told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show: “We made savings in the police budget in the last parliament and actually the number of neighbourhood police officers went up, the proportion of police officers on the front line went up.

“Increasing the counter-terrorism budget by 30% involves money going to the police as well as our security agencies to make sure we can deal with marauding gun attacks, make sure we can stop the guns coming into the country in the first place."

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But the Home Office’s own figures show PCSOs and PCs have both been cut every year since David Cameron swept into Downing Street in 2010.

Britain had 110,000 police constables and 17,000 PCSOs in 2010 - now there are just 99,000 PCs and 12,000 PCSOs.

Lib Dem leader Tim Farron MP said that if the cuts went ahead as planned there could be no PCSOs left.

“The Conservatives slashing of policing budget shows that they are not the party of law and order.

“These cuts will change the face of policing as we know it. They are putting communities at risk and threaten to turn police into a 999 only service,” he said.

Shadow Business Secretary Angela Eagle accused Mr Osborne of pursuing an “ideological obsession” with shrinking the state.

“It will lead to one certainty, after he has finished on Wednesday there will be fewer nurses than we need, fewer teachers than we need and more importantly at this time of security, far fewer protections from the police on our streets than we need.

“The weekend before George Osborne’s spending review you always get the smoke and mirrors of the things he wants you to remember and that’s why you’ve had some of the announcements today about security which I would welcome but actually let’s look at what he’s covering up – a £200million cut to counter terrorism in the Met Force, is that wise?

“We are 17,000 police officers down after the cuts of the last five years in our forces up and down the country, there are some dire warnings today which I think the Chancellor ought to heed about the consequences of some of those ideologically driven cuts, not only for the police but for other public services,” she told Sky News.