Do you feel slightly discomforted when you hear David Cameron, Nick Clegg, or Eric Pickles talk about local government finance and the future of local government?

Secretary of state Eric Pickles and his local government minister Brandon Lewis seem to be in a state of denial, believing that, if only councils adopted their 50 budget saving recommendations, all will be well. It is simply ridiculous to believe that "cutting out the biscuits" or "sacking a chief executive" will come anywhere near to compensating for the scale of the cuts in local government resources.

Between 2010 and 2015, government funding to local government will be cut by 43% in real terms, which is more than twice the level of cuts experienced across government as a whole.

Recently, Cameron repeated a statement first made by George Osborne in the June spending review advising that the latest revision – described as a 'technical adjustment' – would mean just an extra 2.3% cut in the next few years. Independent experts suggest the figure is closer to an extra 10%.

Neither the Treasury nor the Department for Communities and Local Government will say how they arrived at this 2.3% figure. It rather suggests that the calculation is based on adding apples and pears and dividing by cabbage. I've now written to the prime minister asking him to set out his calculations forthwith.

At the same time as the huge overall cuts, the government is imposing a massive transfer of resources from north to south, from urban to rural, and from the poorest areas to the richest. Many northern, urban areas are getting cuts more than five times per head that of their southern counterparts. This transfer is not just in local government resources; it is also taking place in police, fire and health.

We're not talking peanuts. The government's latest NHS resource redistribution proposals would mean that my home city of Sheffield would get a near £50m annual cut which is to be transferred directly to areas where people are already healthier, live longer, have the best quality of life and are the least hit by cuts in council resources.

In the next few weeks, ministers will not only announce the local government settlement, they will also make a decision about the distribution of the £3.8bn health and care integration fund. Both will provide additional opportunities for redistribution.

Despite the more favourable financial treatment being received by southern – usually Conservative and Liberal Democrat – councils, they are now starting to make big cuts. Cameron's own Conservative-controlled Oxfordshire is planning to shut 37 of its 44 Surestart Children's Centres in direct contravention of the pledge he himself made in 2010.

Portsmouth – the biggest council controlled by Clegg's Liberal Democrats – is cutting library and Surestart services, doubling the price of meals-on-wheels and closing half its public toilets.

What most of the media and the public haven't yet realised is that most of the big cuts in council services are yet to come. In the next six months, we will see councils proposing service closures and big fee increases in a whole range of services and that will continue over the next three years at least.

Discretionary services – like leisure and recreation – will be hit first. But, it will simply be impossible for statutory services to stay out of the firing line. Typically, all-purpose councils are spending around 80% of their resources on care for adults and children and on inescapable commitments like debt repayments (for example, on schools and roads), and long-term contracts for refuse collection and disposal.

Based on the government's own current forecast, there are 56 councils whose levels of expenditure are 15% higher than their income is likely to be by 2015-16.

Some are heading into serious financial difficulties. They are councils across the political and geographical spectrum. Some of the already-identified early casualties are not the big cities but smaller, rural, Independent- and Conservative-controlled councils.

What we are looking at is the potential failure of local government as a whole, not through its own fault but because it will not have either the necessary resources from central government or the ability to raise the money itself. This is serious; more serious by far than the challenges of rate-capping on the 1980s.

Clive Betts is MP for Sheffield South East and chair of the Commons communities and local government committee.

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