THE leader of Oxfordshire County Council has warned there are “testing” times ahead as the authority begins preparation for another round of cuts.

Ian Hudspeth’s comments followed a report to the cabinet yesterday that painted a bleak picture of the next five years.

Finance bosses have told senior councillors that savings of between £50m and £60m are likely to be needed by 2020, on top of £88m the local authority still needs to achieve by 2018.

It could force the council to roll back funding for services it is not legally obliged to provide, including community groups, homeless support, libraries and youth centres.

Earlier at the same meeting, senior councillors approved a public consultation on proposals to replace all 44 children’s centres and seven early intervention hubs with eight ‘family and resource centres’.

Mr Hudspeth said: “These figures present an awful lot of savings, but the simple fact is that we have to deliver a balanced budget.

“The decision we have just made [to consult on the closure of children’s centres] was difficult and there will be a lot more difficult decisions to make.

“We do not have another option, so it is going to be very testing.”

To soften the impact of cuts to its budget, the council has already planned to spend 85 per cent of its £130m reserves over the next four years.

But director of children’s services Jim Leivers warned councillors that this could not continue and that a radical overhaul of services was needed. He said: “You have to find a long-term solution to meet your statutory responsibilities.”

The county council’s warning of further cuts is due to a Government spending review currently under way, with unprotected departments asked to find savings of 25-40 per cent.

In the report to councillors, chief finance officer Lorna Baxter said people in Oxfordshire would be presented with a series of options on where savings could be made in the coming months.

After a consultation the findings are expected to be examined by a cross-party scrutiny committee of councillors.

Labour leader of the opposition Liz Brighouse – who chairs the scrutiny committee – said: “We already don’t have enough money to run services as they are and we cannot raise enough money either by putting up council tax.

“This is just another attack on local government that will force it to again bear the brunt of cuts.

“I simply cannot see how we will find £60m of cuts in this period of time.

“We also need to be thinking about the wider impact they will have alongside cuts to welfare in Oxford and Oxfordshire, where private rents are already very high.”

Mrs Brighouse said she believed the council could save additional money by bringing more of its services in-house, rather than contracting them out.