UNLIKE some of its neighbours, Conservative-controlled Lancashire County Council has refused to blame the Government for its financial plight.

Instead, the £179million spending cuts agreed last month have been laid firmly at the door of Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, to the fury of Labour opposition councillors.

But behind the scenes there have still been some angry exchanges with Whitehall.

Susie Charles, cabinet member for schools, slammed Michael Gove for cutting the academies budget.

And now we learn that the civil servants have not always seen eye to eye over funding.

This letter from chief executive Phil Halsall (he was resources director at the time) to the Department for Communities and Local Government sheds light on the chaos caused to council budgets by the upheaval, uncertainty and spending cuts.

There’s no need to understand the fiendishly complicated world of local government finance to recognise that terms like ‘wholly unsatisfactory state of affairs’, ‘difficult to see a rationale’ and ‘completely undermining the principle of stability’ aren’t good news.

“The fact that councils even by the middle of January do not have a full picture of their spending power is not a satisfactory situation”, Mr Halsall writes.

He singles out the coalition’s New Homes Bonus (which is said to favour wealthy areas where development takes places in high council tax bands), bus passes for over 60s (£2.2million funding black hole), and Coun Charles’ complaint about cash for academies for particular criticism.

Council leader Geoff Driver made no written representations to central Gvernment about the council’s grant, we were told.