A STARK warning about services has been issued by the leader of a council being forced into more job cuts.

Carlisle City Council is looking to shed another 45 jobs and is seeking volunteers for redundancy between now and Christmas.

They are being made against the backdrop of the authority being forced to slash £4.6m from its budget over the next four years – meaning it will be down almost 40 per cent compared to 2010.

Leader Colin Glover highlighted the strain of continued cuts and said: “We’re having to decide which services we’re going to do and which we’re going to stop doing because the money won’t stretch to cover everything.”

The cutbacks to services are unavoidable, council chiefs say, because job cuts have led to shortages of staff to run them. Once this latest round of redundancies is complete, the council will have reduced its workforce to 368, a decrease of 35 per cent since 2010 when it was 568.

The authority will take its lead when choosing which services to prioritise and which to stop from the Carlisle Plan.

Mr Glover said the council worked with the Local Government Association last year to decide what priorities should be.

He said: “The plan was about trying to make sure our reducing resources follows our priorities because we don’t want this to be a race to the bottom. We’ve got to try to have a thriving city and it’s very difficult to deliver that when you’ve diminishing resources, but we can’t just give up on the city.

“We’ve got to be working hard to protect frontline services but also make it a city that people want to invest in and live.”

Chancellor George Osborne’s announcement on Tuesday that councils will in future be able to keep business rates from their area has not elicited any hope from Mr Glover.

He said: “We don’t know how it’s going to be phased and, more importantly, we don’t what the other side of the equation is when the Chancellor stands up and gives the Autumn Statement.

“It could easily be a case of giving with one hand and taking away even more with the other.”

The council leader has been told by the Local Government Association to expect additional cuts of between 25 and 40 per cent.