The writer Misha Glenny, who will chair a panel of senior officers at the NCA’s report launch in London on Tuesday, said the austerity drive had allowed powerful crime syndicates to flourish in the UK.

Glenny, whose book McMafia documented the globalisation of crime after the break-up of the Soviet bloc, said that when it was published in 2008 organised crime was viewed as a global concern and its impact on most British citizens was minimal.

“In the past 10 years what is really striking is how this industry has grown inside the UK. Austerity has been absolutely critical in this, partly because of the reduction in police capacity but also because of the continuing increase in inequality. A lot of victims of organised crime tend to be people on the margins who don’t have a voice. When you get an impoverishment of the population, which is what we have had over the last 10 years, you get an increase in desperation, and that opens up opportunities,” added Glenny.

Transnational criminal networks, the exploitation of technological improvements and “old-style violence” is allowing serious crime gangs to “dominate communities”, the NCA assessment will say this week.

“It will reveal the changing nature of organised crime and its wholesale undermining of the UK’s economy, integrity, infrastructure and institutions,” said the NCA in a statement.

The assessment, described as the most comprehensive yet by the NCA, will also chart the rise of poly-criminality where organised groups operate in several illegal trades such as drugs, firearms and human trafficking. Last year the agency mapped 4,629 OCGs (organised crime groups) inside the UK with tens of thousands of members and says the threat has since continued to grow. One area of enduring concern remains the use of encrypted and anonymisation technology, the latter primarily on the dark web, that have eroded the ability of investigators to detect offenders.

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.

More than £10bn of taxpayers’ money is being wasted because the government continues to ignore emerging warning signs on key public services, allowing pressures to build—and then diverting emergency cash to the

This wasteful cycle is highlighted in new analysis from the Institute for Government and the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA), published on 19 October. Worryingly, Performance Tracker, our data-driven analysis of nine public services – across health, education, law and order, neighbourhood services and immigration – finds that this emergency cash isn’t being used to solve the underlying issues in these services, but is simply keeping them going in their current state.

Prisons, for instance, are in the middle of a serious operational crisis after a failure to spot warning signs in the data when the government doubled down on cuts to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) budget in the 2015 spending review.

The chancellor also has little room to manoeuvre on hospitals, which will continue to run deficits. Despite these overspends, accident and emergency waiting targets are still being missed, and the number of people waiting for elective surgery is the highest it has been for a decade. Demand continues to rise with emergency accident and emergency admissions up 3% in the last year, and 30% since 2009.

The government has already made cash injections in schools and adult social care- but these are little more than sticking plasters.

The government is seeking another £16bn in spending cuts of current or “resource” spending by 2020, according to an IFS analysis of its plans.

Separately from that, the Treasury is seeking £12bn in cuts to welfare spending, from tax credits managed by HMRC and other benefits administered by the Department for Work and Pensions. Capital spending on big-ticket investments such as road and rail improvements is protected.

A number of departments, including health, international development and defence, as well as part of the schools budget are also ringfenced. This means other departments are facing cuts of up to 40%, which are likely to lead to large reductions in Whitehall staff numbers. [this is interesting as Tony Travers pointed out at the RSN conference nearly all the significant staffing reductions in the public sector so far have been focused at the local level and the numbers employed in Whitehall have currently hardly reduced at all]

Cuts agreed

Treasury

Osborne’s own department oversees HMRC, which is responsible for tax credit spending. The department has already agreed to resource spending cuts of 30% but is still working out how to reduce the impact of a plan for £4bn of cuts to tax credits that was rejected by the House of Lords.

Communities and Local Government

DCLG has agreed to cuts of about 30% over the next four years. This is separate to funding for local government, and is likely to involve the closure of what the Treasury refers to as “low-value programmes”.

Transport

Cuts of 30% have been agreed to the DfT’s current budget over the next four years. It could affect sustainable transport and funding for buses, walking and cycling programmes. Capital spending is protected so big investments in road and rail will go ahead as planned.

Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

Cuts of 30% have been agreed, with the department expected to scale back the extent of its footprint while trying to prioritise spending on flood and disease prevention.

Gary Porter, the Conservative councillor who chairs the cross-party LGA, said this analysis showed councils would be facing significant challenges even without the deep cuts anticipated in this autumn’s spending review.

Councils could not cope with further cuts without compensation, he said. “Leaving councils to pick up the bill for new national policies while being handed further spending reductions cannot be an option,” said Porter, who was made a peer in last week’s honours list.

“Enormous pressure will be heaped on already stretched local services if the government fails to fully assess the impact of these unfunded cost burdens when making its spending decisions for the next five years. Vital services, such as caring for the elderly, protecting children, collecting bins, filling potholes and maintaining our parks and green spaces, will simply struggle to continue at current levels.”

The LGA says Osborne’s decision in his last budget to cut social housing rents by 1% a year will cost councils £2.6bn – or the equivalent of the cost of building 19,000 new homes.

Councils will need an extra £1.75bn to process business rate appeals when revaluation is introduced in 2017, the LGA says, and it estimates that universal credit could cost authorities up to £1bn because overpaid housing benefit will be harder to recover.

Paying the national living wage to council staff and care workers will cost councils £834m by 2019-20, the LGA says, while £172m a year will be incurred as a result of a supreme court ruling last year that will lead to more elderly people who face being taken into care undergoing a deprivation of liberty safeguards (DoLS) assessment.

Porter said councils needed fairer funding and more devolution. “If our public services are to survive the next five years, councils need fairer funding and the freedom to pay for them,” he said.

“Only radical reform of the way public money is spent and widespread devolution of transport, housing, skills and health and social care across England in the spending review can protect the services which bind our communities together and protect our most vulnerable.”