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.”

This story profiling a protest about the loss of benefits for the disabled suggests that the public are more switched on than I might have feared.

It explains: “If the size of the Hardest Hit march was relatively small compared with last autumn’s student demonstrations (with police estimates ranging between 3,000 and 8,000), consider the hurdles facing many of the participants – the everyday problems of inaccessible public transport, and the high cost of rail travel for those dependent on disability benefits.

“The protesters from the West Country said they were already so acutely conscious of the consequences of local authority funding shortages, and anxious about the impact of changes to the benefits system, that making the choice to come and protest was not difficult.”

We know that rural local authorities have to raise more per head in Council Tax than their urban counterparts to deliver services and I suspect some authorities will really struggle to balance the books with no scope to increase funding allowed this year from that quarter.

This story suggests they may have the ability to engage the genuine understanding and engagement of those they serve rather than just the blame!