FLOG your golf course to fund front-line public services, English councils were told yesterday after another huge funding cut.

Local authorities already facing a financial black hole saw their budgets slashed again by £4 billion in the Autumn Statement.

Parks, children’s centres, libraries, museums and leisure centres will be closed completely or scaled back as councils try to protect life-saving social care, the Local Government Association warned.

But Chancellor George Osborne claimed their losses would be compensated with new rights to pocket the proceeds of public facilities they privatise.

“Local government is sitting on property worth a quarter of a trillion pounds,” he said.

“So we’re going to let councils spend 100 per cent of the receipts from the assets they sell to improve local services.”

Asked which services should be sold, Treasury officials singled out 6,000 shops, 350 pubs and 298 golf courses and a cinema currently owned by councils.

The suggested sell-off of public property was part of radical changes to local government funding.

Mr Osborne revealed he is going to phase out Treasury funding for local councils completely by the end of the parliament.

Local councils will instead be allowed to keep money raised from business rates, in what the Chancellor dubbed a “revolution in the way we govern this country.”

They will also be allowed to put 2 per cent extra on council tax to pay for social care services.

Mr Osborne claimed that “local government will be spending the same in cash terms as it does today” after the funding changes are implemented.

But Unison, which represents hundreds of thousands local government workers, accused the Chancellor of “passing the buck” on social care to cash-strapped councils.

General secretary Dave Prentis added: “Allowing local councils to raise council taxes locally to put more cash in social care will create a postcode lottery, where more deprived areas have less to spend than wealthier ones.

“Similarly allowing local councils to raise and spend their own business rates means yet more uncertainty, and also risks widening the gap between income-rich and income-poor areas."