The unfolding council funding crisis is being overlooked by the Government - Andrew Vine

But next to nothing is being said about a problem that ranks alongside all of these matters as demanding urgent attention, which is the crisis unfolding in town halls as more councils struggle to balance their books.

Yorkshire is on the front line of this massive threat to local services, with an ever-lengthening list of councils facing huge black holes in their budgets which cannot be plugged without drastic action involving cuts and possible job losses.

Last week, City of York Council became the latest authority to reveal the scale of its difficulties, with a budget gap predicted to be more than £32m by 2030.

Its problems are mirrored elsewhere. In Kirklees, the gap is £24m. A year ago, Leeds was staring into a £40m hole. In Bradford’s year as UK City of Culture, the city’s council needed emergency funding from the government.

In the coming months, as other councils in our county finalise their budgets for the year ahead, there will be similar stories, all of them painting a picture of local government trying but failing to cope with impossible demands placed upon it.

With luck, nowhere in Yorkshire will go the way of Birmingham, where the council was effectively declared bankrupt and the government had to take control in order to sort out the mess. But even if they don’t, council taxpayers across the county are going to feel the pain of this crisis.

At a time when household budgets are under strain, a big energy price hike is looming and filling the car with petrol or diesel costs a small fortune, council tax bills will be going up and services cut.

It is going to feel like paying more for less and communities everywhere will be poorer for the closure of libraries or children’s centres.

Far too little attention is being paid to this crisis for the providers of some of our most essential public services and that has been the case with successive governments. Birmingham should have been a wake-up call for ministers, making them question the wider financial health of local government, but it wasn’t.

It has often seemed that central government unfairly sees its local counterpart as a very junior partner in the everyday running of the country and views its problems with a lofty disregard.

That cannot continue, or we will reach a point where councils are financially crippled and unable to deliver essential services.

The headaches in town halls across Yorkshire have been a long time coming and are largely caused by the costs of social care and special educational needs provision. The bills for both have soared in recent years, draining budgets and financial reserves.

Increases in government grants and hikes in council tax bills have failed to keep pace with the rising costs.

The government needs to get a grip of this issue, but the signs are not hopeful. There wasn’t anything about councils in last week’s budget, and the Prime Minister’s ambition to establish a national care service that could potentially take some of the pressure off local government is years away from being realised, if it ever happens at all.

Andy Burnham’s long tenure as Greater Manchester’s mayor should give him a much greater understanding of local government than most of his recent predecessors as Premier, because his role involved close co-operation with councils.

And that should tell him they need to be rescued from their current plight if his aim of greater devolved powers for regions such as Yorkshire is going to achieve results.

Mayors like the four in Yorkshire will struggle to grow the economy, create new jobs and deliver better services if the councils on their patches are in a permanent state of crisis and making staff redundant.

Talk of growth in every postcode thanks to devolution is going to sound very hollow if every year brings a new round of local authority cuts to make the books balance.

Announcements by the mayors of prestige, centrally-funded schemes aren’t going to impress council taxpayers whose bins aren’t being emptied often enough or protest against the closure of popular leisure centres to save money.