The Government has been warned it faces a “rural revolution” as council taxpayers in parts of Yorkshire face bills of up to three times more than some of London’s most exclusive boroughs.

North Yorkshire County Council’s deputy leader Gareth Dadd told colleagues “we are now at the tipping point of acceptability over council tax”, as the authority pushed forward council tax increases with a “heavy heart”.

But Coun Dadd said: “This evidence will be paramount with Government lobbying. We are now at a tipping point of acceptability over council tax. Some may say this is a bit of a rural revolution.”

The council’s cabinet meeting heard the Government had created an additional budgeting headache by proposing local authorities be banned from using general funds to subsidise shortfalls in school funding without Secretary of State approval. Without extra funding, cash for children with special educational needs and disabilities would face a £12m shortfall over the next four years.

But Coun Dadd said the root cause of North Yorkshire’s difficulties centred on an unfair formula being used by the Government to calculate how much funding councils should receive.

He told members: “It cannot be right, as efficient as we are, for an average band D property council tax in North Yorkshire to be £1,544 and for a band D property in an average inner London borough to be £1,157, with some Westminster, for example, being £433 or £754 if you count the Greater London Authority. This inequality has been prevailing for decades under governments of all political colours.”

Almost all councils in England plan to increase council tax from April and three-quarters intend to raise it above 2.75%, research reveals.

The maximum rise allowed without a local referendum is 2.99%. Similar proportions plan to raise charges and fees.

Despite council tax bills soaring, many residents face further cuts in services. Most councils warned that they would be reducing a range of services, from adult social care to libraries and recycling.

The annual survey by the Local Government Information Unit thinktank found that cuts were increasingly visible and that after eight years of austerity – which has cost English councils 40% of their central funding – half of councils felt cuts were now “negatively affecting relationships with citizens”.

Cuts to services such as pothole repair, waste collection, school crossing patrols and libraries proved especially unpopular, the research found. Last week Somerset and Northamptonshire county councils reversed winter gritting cuts after a public outcry when untreated roads caused several car accidents during the recent cold snap.

One in 20 councils said they were concerned that funding cuts were now so deep that they would struggle to deliver the legal minimum level of services. Almost one in 10 anticipate legal challenges from the public against proposed cuts in service provision.

On the Thames riverbank in West Molesey, Surrey, around 10 boats are moored on a stretch of unregistered land, meaning the group which includes a serving policeman and a months-old baby, have not been obliged to pay mooring fees or council tax.

Some of the residents have lived there with little disruption from the authorities for nearly 13 years.

But local mother-of-three Lara Seal, 36, whose house is metres from the riverbank, claims that a small group of antisocial temporary boaters prompted complaints from other locals in July.

She told The Telegraph: “Two or three boats last Summer gave the good ones a bad name. They were drinking, shouting, they have a lot of dogs.

“The permanent group are my neighbours, we have a community and all look after each other.

“They have all been tarred with the same brush.”

Following complaints over the “eyesore” stretch of river, the Environment Agency began removing 20 abandoned boats in the area in October and November last year, using its powers as the navigation authority of the non-tidal River Thames.

It owns the riverbed and has applied to the Land Registry for the rights to the land at the side, which could see the permanent community disbanded and moved on.

The residents, who claim to have all the valid relevant registration certificates, are now fearing “eviction” and are locked in a battle with the Environment Agency as they fight to have the land registered to them.

Unprecedented increases in council tax starting in April will not offset cuts to services including children’s centres and libraries, local authorities have warned.

The Local Government Association (LGA) said councils in England would raise an estimated £1.1bn through higher council taxes in 2017-18, but this would not cover the £1.4bn lost through cuts to central government funding plus the higher wage bill of £1bn.

Nearly half of English councils with responsibility for providing social care for adults and children will increase council tax by the maximum 5.99% allowed – 2.99% for general council tax plus a further levy of up to 3% to pay for the care of older and disabled adults – but this will not prevent further cuts to services, according to the LGA.

Councils will continue to reduce or close services such as children’s centres, libraries, leisure centres, parks, museums and road repairs to plug growing gaps in adult and children’s social care and homelessness services, it says.

The widespread emergence of what some councillors have dubbed “pay more, get less” budget settlements comes as town halls struggle to balance the books after years of cuts in core government funding.

Northamptonshire county council effectively declared itself bankrupt earlier this month after admitting that rising costs and shrinking income made it unable to set a legal budget.

The council must set out revised plans for cuts at a meeting this week after an auditors report warned that its existing proposed budget plans were “not credibly achievable”.

Northamptonshire’s predicament highlights how councils are increasingly reliant on one-off measures such as dipping into reserves, or selling buildings and land, to meet the spiralling cost of social care. Those pressures are being compounded in some cases by the failure to deliver savings with existing cuts.

The LGA said 147 of the 152 English authorities that provide social care services would levy a 3% council tax precept from April to raise extra cash for the care of older and disabled adults. Although this will raise an extra £548m, it will be wiped out by the cost of meeting the national minimum wage.

These councils face additional costs estimated to be at least £400m over the next 12 months as result of a legal judgement that requires care employers to pay the minimum wage to carers working sleep-in shifts, backdated for six years.

Out of the 152 “social care” authorities, 108 also plan to increase general council tax by between 2.95% and the maximum 2.99% allowed. This will raise an estimated £548m. Five councils have said they will freeze council tax for 2018-19.

Local authorities are to be allowed to raise council tax by up to 5.99% next year, after a further relaxation of the government-imposed cap to address shortfalls in funding for social care.

Families across the UK could see their bills rise by up to £100 a year as a result of the announcement, which will also see councils increasing the charge without holding local referendums.

The move, which has been widely criticised and called “woefully inadequate” by leaders in the social care sector, could see the average band D council tax bill rising to £1,653.30.

Sajid Javid, the communities secretary, said all councils would be able to raise council tax by up to 2.99% next year to fund local services, which is 1% more than this year. On top of this, 152 councils, which includes all London boroughs, unitary and metropolitan authorities and county councils, will be able to increase it by an additional “precept” 3% to fund social care services.

The minister also announced that 10 councils – Berkshire, Derbyshire, Devon, Gloucestershire, Kent & Medway, Leeds, Lincolnshire, Solent, Suffolk and Surrey – would be involved in a pilot scheme allowing them to retain 100% of business rates raised locally, along with new powers for police and crime commissioners to raise council tax.

Local Government secretary Eric Pickles has said town halls had a moral duty to freeze council tax for people struggling with rising household budgets. He set aside £450m over two years as part of the autumn statement package to help support the freeze.

But figures published today show that only 61 per cent of local authorities – 257 out of 421 – have are accepting cash from Whitehall to fund a council tax freeze.

The remainder have decided not to use the grant money, and instead of increased the tax for millions of home owners from the beginning of next month.

Official figures from the Department for Communities and Local Government show thatin England the average Band D council tax is going up by 0.8 per cent in 2013/14.

The increase, from £1,444 to £1,456 is the biggest increase for three years since 2010/11. Last year the tax increased by 0.3 per cent and zero per cent in 2011/12.

Clive Betts, the chairman of the Commons’ Communities and Local Government committee, said councils were turning their backs on the money because of concerns it would not be available in future years.

“A North East council is set to cut at least 1,300 jobs as it looks to reduce its budget by £90 million. Newcastle City Council has outlined proposals, which will also see ten libraries close, equal to a cut of £760 for each household in the city. Described by the council as one of its “darkest days”, the authority has blamed a “grossly unfair” cut to their Government grant. Leader of Newcastle City Council, Councillor Nick Forbes, said: “This is one of the darkest days for public service in Newcastle. Cutting services is not what I went into politics to do. “The cut in Government grant is grossly unfair, at a time when more and more families are turning to us for help. Financially, this has put us in an impossible position from which there is no escape.”

Not much balm in terms of these problems from CLG: “A Communities and Local Government Spokesman said: “Council funding is distributed in a fair and sustainable way across all parts of the country – rural and urban, metropolitan and shire and higher in those parts of the country with the highest level of need.”

The funding gap between what neighbouring local councils receive from Whitehall has been revealed in a new report. Politicians in the East Riding have long complained about being under-funded in comparison with other local authorities.

​New figures presented to East Riding scrutiny councillors have confirmed their beliefs. They show government funding received by the East Riding equates to £374 per head of population. That is lower than the average for councils classed as predominantly rural authorities, in which more than half of the population live in rural areas. The East Riding falls into the same category, with 71 per cent of its population classed as rural.

The £374-per-head figure also compares unfavourably with Hull, which receives just over £700 per head from the Government. The city council’s higher direct funding is primarily attributable to Hull having higher levels of deprivation.

But the figures show the East Riding is also lagging behind its other Humber neighbours, with both North Lincolnshire and North East Lincolnshire also receiving more funding per head. Local MPs have recently backed campaigns led by the Sparsity Partnership for Authorities Delivering Rural Services and the so-called F4 Group of the 40 lowest-funded education authorities.

Councillor Brian Skow, chairman of the East Riding’s corporate and communities scrutiny committee, said: “We get far less than Hull but cover a much bigger geographical area.”

Councillor Paul Hogan said: “This report does highlight a huge issue for councils like ours.”

Council chief accountant Jim Wright said the higher cost of delivering services such as education, social care and household waste collections across a large rural area like the East Riding was not factored into the formula used by the government to decide on local council funding.”

The Chair of our All Party Parliamentary Committee on Rural Services Graham Stuart has his constituency in East Riding and he is becoming an increasingly powerful advocate in terms of this issue – watch this space!!!

Local authorities have conceded that up to half of people on low incomes will refuse to pay council tax after being caught in the net by benefit changes next year, and that there is little they can do about it.

Under coalition plans to reduce council tax benefits 2 million low-income workers will face an average bill of £247 a year from April – a charge from which they are currently exempt.

But the sums are so small – on average less than £5 a week – that councils are warning it “would in many cases be uneconomic to recover, with the costs of collection, including legal recovery costs, being higher than the bill”. The result is that councils are budgeting for large losses and potentially leaving the door open to widespread non-payment.

A series of freedom of information requests by False Economy, a campaigning group part-funded by trade unions, found that the two dozen councils that responded were resigned to seeing swaths of residents refusing to pay the tax.

The Consumer Credit Counselling Service (CCCS) saw a 27% increase in the number of people contacting it for help with council tax arrears, from 13,353 in 2010 to 16,958 in 2011. The average amount owed in council tax arrears also increased, from £675 in 2010 to £717 in 2011.

The CCCS says much of the increase has been fuelled by the worsening financial position of tenants, with more people who rent than homeowners contacting the charity about council tax arrears for the first time. A total of 8,841 renters sought advice on council tax debts in 2011, up from 6,084 in 2010.