On Monday, the Chancellor of the Exchequer delivered his budget two days early, reportedly because he wished to avoid a ‘Halloween Budget’. Among his various claims was that the budget signalled ‘an end to austerity’ and that local communities would benefit, especially from limited business rate relief for beleaguered high streets.

Hurrah, you might think, the ruinous and, frankly, cruel austerity policies favoured by the current government and the Lib-Dem/Tory coalition preceding it are over at last.

What on earth are we to make then, post-Budget, of the government’s continuing plans to slash local council spending to the bone?

Perhaps that language sounds dramatic. But official figures show that the revenue support grant – the main source of government funding for local services – will be cut by 36 per cent next year, the largest annual deduction in almost a decade.

In fact, almost half of all councils (168) are scheduled to receive no support grant next year – an increase of more than tenfold compared to 2017/18. According to recent analysis by the Local Government Association (LGA), overall, councils will have suffered a 77 per cent decrease in government funding between 2015/16 and next year, dropping from £9,927m in 2015-16 to £2,284m in 2019-20.

Let that sink in. Every £10 received by councils in revenue support grant has been reduced over that period to just £2. Apply that to your own household income and the shocking state of the government’s neglect of our communities grows uncomfortably plain. City of York Council, for example, has been forced to make £millions of ‘savings’ to balance the books.

The LGA rightly point out that councils face unprecedented stresses and demands, that carry the danger of ‘tipping many over the edge’. Warnings are piling up from charities and experts of continuing cuts to vital local authority provisions for vulnerable people, such as the elderly, at-risk children and homeless people. So much so, the Local Government Association fear hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens may be left to ‘fend for themselves’.

Just as every room in our home plays a function to improve our lives, so with local government services.

Talking of homes, what democratic institution apart from a properly funded local authority has the faintest chance of dealing with our city’s housing crisis? As it is, hundreds of families desperate for an affordable home are on the council’s waiting lists. In addition, street homelessness is booming. I fear the government hopes the majority who are relatively well off in Britain, will concentrate only on their own month-to-month grind, debt repayments and, in many cases, overdraft juggling. Meanwhile, far too many of our fellow citizens are crammed into box rooms or sofa-surfing, even as they work for low pay or in zero-hour jobs.

Or take something less life-threatening than the chronically underfunded social care system, such as the state of our roads. All of us have wondered why so many potholes have appeared since 2008 and how the problem only gets worse year after year. The solution is simple: yet the £420M announced in the budget to fix potholes is 5% of what the LGA estimates is needed to address the problem.

Personally, I grow tired of being told this state of affairs is unavoidable, like winter or the common cold. At some point us ‘little people’ in York face a stark choice when it comes to funding City of York Council we rely on in numerous ways. Do we say enough austerity, enough cuts, enough pointless and wasteful privatisation and outsourcing, or do we take back control of our own local services by funding and managing them properly for the public good?

When you strip away the government’s misleading waffle and verbiage, the reason for their planned local government cuts is very simple: very rich people and corporations do not want to pay their fair share in taxes. But the time for sticking our heads in the sand is rapidly passing. Either we stand up for treasured local public services or allow them to fall into terminal decline. Austerity is not over for local communities. It is deliberately misleading for multi-millionaire politicians like Philip Hammond to pretend otherwise.