The Council says it must save more than £21m over the next year with swingeing cuts to adult care, bins and highways – and an increase in service costs.

More than 150 Cheshire East workers also face the chop.

CEC leader Coun Wesley Fitzgerald has warned that the pre-budget report – now called the Draft Business Plan – signals a ‘challenging year’.

The report for April 2012 to April 2013 outlines:
> £7.1m cuts from highways and waste
> £2.1m to be lost from adult services – including care provision for the elderly
> Frozen council tax in line with government 'freeze grant' of £4.5m
> A £0.65m loss due to lower council tax base - partly because more people are living alone
> £1.6m clawed back by increasing service costs for residents.

CEC  will borrow £31m for investment and schemes – up  £7m from the amount  borrowed last year.

It will invest an extra £1.3m in children and families – but it must spend £2.6m on inherited redundancy costs. An extra £1.2m will go to fostering and early intervention but support will lose £1m and school bus funding will go down by £0.6m.

The council has £718 to spend per head – well below the national average for England of £951. This is down to a decrease in central grants and the council keeping just 44pc of its business rates.

Coun Fitzgerald, pictured, said: “The needs of older people provide the biggest call for resources. More and more people are turning to the council for care needs as their own capital dwindles.

“With 12 new cases being referred every four weeks, the demand is outstripping the resources – and again Cheshire East receives one of the lowest government grants for this service.”

He said the council had ‘huge success’ making £100,000 savings in landfill charges – but added: “The substantial increases year-by-year in landfill tax means that we can never catch up.”

He said children and vulnerable people were at the forefront of improvement aims  and that inspection results showed improvement.

In 2010, the Chancellor announced a 25 per cent cut in government grants to councils over four years.

Coun Fitzgerald said: “This coupled with austerity measures have resulted in a requirement of £7m savings in 2012/13.

However, when the significant increase in service demand, especially among children and vulnerable older people, is added, as well as inflation, the true savings need to be in excess of £20m.”