Exclusive: Miliband savages ‘arrogant’ Tories over cuts

In his strongest attack over the scale of cuts being forced on town halls, he accused Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles of engaging in “megaphone diplomacy”. He rejected claims by Prime Minister David Cameron that politically motivated Labour councils were deliberately cutting services rather than making back office efficiencies, branding the allegations “outrageous” and “pathetic”.

Mr Miliband spoke out in an exclusive interview with the Yorkshire Post as three of the region’s councils, York, Bradford and Hull, discussed budgets for next year.

Care homes and adult day care centres face the axe in Hull after the ruling Liberal Democrats last night voted through £65m budget cuts which will mean the loss of around 1,300 jobs.

The savings, which will see 500 jobs axed in children and youth services, were described by the Labour group as an “abysmal failure” and were approved as councillors in Bradford agreed cuts of £56m which will result in 2,000 job losses across the authority.

The votes came a day after councillors in Leeds signed off a £90m package of cuts while in Sheffield savings of up to £80m have been agreed.

Mr Miliband denied Labour bore responsibility for cuts of up to 23 per cent being forced on councils over the next two years – which the Government says are essential to rescue the economy – although he admitted more should have been done to boost the private sector in places like Barnsley.

“There’s only one set of people who are responsible for this and that’s the Tory-led overnment in London because they have, in an arrogant way, imposed these cuts without a regard as to the impact they’re going to have,” said the Doncaster North MP. “I think they will pay the price at the local council elections.”

Although Mr Miliband has criticised the scale of cuts before, the strength of his attack on Mr Pickles is striking. The Minister has already infuriated Liberal Democrat councillors, 90 of whom signed a letter criticising his approach earlier this month, and this week it emerged even Tory council leaders such as North Yorkshire’s John Weighell had warned the scale of cuts would have a “potentially devastating” impact.

Mr Pickles’s repeated attacks on chief executive pay, town hall jobs and insistence that front-line services such as home care and libraries can be protected if authorities become more efficient have caused particular irritation.

Mr Miliband said: “The attitude of Eric Pickles baffles me because I think he displays all the hallmarks of someone who is arrogant and high-handed. As far as I can tell Liberal Democrats and Tories as well as Labour people are quite fed up of him and he hasn’t been in the job for that long.

“Instead of engaging in megaphone diplomacy, having a go at councils, he should have been defending his corner so he wasn’t imposing such enormous cuts on people. I just think it’s tiresome.

“Of course he’s going to try to throw up smokescreens to make it about so-called non-jobs or about local authority chief executive salaries. I’m in favour of pay restraint among local authority chief executives, but the idea you can cut tens of millions of pounds by saving money on the chief executives salary is frankly an insult to people’s intelligence.”

Mr Pickles has blamed the cuts on Labour for leaving the economy in such a bad state.