LABOUR has been urged to back local services after an investigation found council deficits have rocketed to over £5 billion.

After years of Tory cuts, basic services are under threat as never before, with a BBC probe revealing that town halls’ debt interest payments have risen by 60 per cent in two years to an average of £33 million.

Adult social care, disability support, leisure centres and discounts for waste collection and parking face unprecedented cuts as council chiefs expect to be £5.2bn short of balancing the books by April 2026 — despite making £2.5bn of planned cuts.

Today a spokesman for Momentum told the Morning Star: “These alarming figures are the appalling result of 13 years of Tory austerity.

“Local government funding has been slashed and slashed again, and we are all paying the price in declining public services, from libraries to social care.

“The reality is that there is no hope for tackling this Tory-made crisis without major public investment: it’s popular, it’s urgent and it’s the right thing to do.

“The Labour leadership should ditch its fiscal conservatism and commit to invest in Britain’s future, including with a major funding boost for local government.”

Unison is warning that growing financial black holes mean some local authorities won’t even be able to offer the legal minimum of care next year.

The union’s head of local government Mike Short said: “Essential services are being slashed across the board. It’s the inevitable disastrous result of ministers underfunding local authorities for years and insisting an ever-higher share of their budgets are from council-tax hikes.

“Deprived areas are often the hardest hit because they’re least able to raise the money locally.

“What’s needed is long-term investment to rebuild the workforce, skills and infrastructure that have been lost.

“Proper funding for pay is vital. Wages have plummeted in value and staff are leaving in droves for better-paid private-sector work.

“Any long-term plan must include a fairer funding system so government money is allocated to communities  based on need.”

Councillor Shaun Davies, who chairs the Local Government Association, said inflation, the introduction of the national living wage, energy costs and increasing demand for services are adding “billions of extra costs just to keep services standing still.”

He warned councils are having to make cutbacks to services to meet their legal duty to balance the books this year and using reserves to plug funding gaps.

Up to £1.1bn of reserves will be used to balance the books this year, according to the BBC survey of 190 upper-tier authorities in the UK; at least £467m will be stripped from adult care services, which include elderly care homes, respite centres and support services for people with disabilities.

Mr Davies said: “The government needs to come up with a long-term plan to sufficiently fund local services.

“This must include greater funding certainty for councils through multi-year settlements and more clarity on financial reform so they can plan effectively, balance competing pressures across different service areas and maximise the impact of their spending.”

Mikey Erhardt, campaigns and policy officer at Disability Rights UK said local authorities’ services, including social care, housing or education, are absolutely vital to enable disabled children and adults to live their lives.

“The current cross-party political consensus on cuts means that budget blackholes will only lead down one route: service reductions,” he said.

“These will be devastating for millions of disabled people, resulting in even lower levels of support and failure to tackle societal barriers, further impoverishing our lives.

“Good public services are not a drain on the budget: they are an investment in everyone’s quality of life.”

Council funding — through a mix of council tax, business rates, income from services such as parking and social housing rent, as well as money from the government known as the revenue support grant — has declined by nearly a third between 2010 and 2021, according to Parliament’s public accounts committee.

The Department of Levelling-Up, Housing & Communities said no decision on council funding levels would be taken until the spending review next year, and that the predicted deficit figures for 2025-26 were “unsupported.”

The Scottish and Welsh governments said they had increased resources for councils this financial year.