EVER since 2008 we have all known that, like ripples on a pond, every part of the UK, including Oxfordshire, would be affected by the huge debts that the previous Government accumulated, writes Oxfordshire County Council leader Keith Mitchell.

That’s why last year the county council announced plans to save around £100m over five years from April 2010 to March 2015.

The previous Government did not choose to tackle this issue. However a new Government is now in place and we know that of the £2.6bn worth of savings recently announced by the Chancellor, local government will be required nationally to save £1.165bn.

Local government receives around two-thirds of its funding from a complex network of grants from central government. Some of these are general grants while others are for specific purposes.

As yet, we don’t know exactly how much these grants will be cut – however we do believe that it will not only be our day-to-day budgets that will be hit.

We also think money for our building work and major projects will be affected.

To anticipate that, we are now faced with an immensely difficult task – choosing which schemes are the most important and prioritising to be ready for whatever percentage cut we end up having to face.

We face choices between school building projects and removal of temporary classrooms, major road-building projects, extensions to fire stations and improvements to libraries.

In an ideal world we would want to do all of these jobs – that’s why we had such plans in the first place.

However, this is not an ideal world. The country is £900bn in debt. So here we are with the pigeons coming home to roost for every local authority up and down the land.

When David Cameron talks of painful choices ahead in terms of public spending, this is what he means at the nitty-gritty local level.

I hope that people will continue to remember why we are having to make these decisions, especially if they hear some disappointing news in coming months.