How has it come to this at Wolverhampton City Council?

Every few months the number of people that Wolverhampton City Council plans to make redundant has soared.

In fact it is now 2,000, which is double the number originally outlined in October, when the authority went out to consultation on 165 individual savings plans designed to cope with cuts in Government funding.

The Labour party painted a depressingly bleak picture just after Christmas.

Faced with a gaping black hole in funding of £123 million over five years, the councillor in charge of finance, Andrew Johnson, forecast a storm of discontent:

"The government has put this council in a position where we could struggle to provide essential services such as caring for the elderly or emptying bins," he said. "We are now realistically looking at the prospect of becoming insolvent unless we make very deep and very fast cuts."

As thousands of staff gathered at the Civic Hall to be briefed about the budget, the Labour leader of the council, Roger Lawrence, said the insolvency had been avoided and that the bins would indeed be emptied. But at an enormous cost.

More than one third of the council's 5,739-strong workforce, not including schools, will have to go.

City council cuts latest

To put those 2,000 jobs into context, that is 600 more jobs lost than will be created when Jaguar Land Rover reaches full production at its £500m engine plant at the i54, the biggest individual investment by a private company in Wolverhampton in living memory.

The ruling Labour party is adamant that the council's woes are down to the Coalition Government, which it says has left the council £147m worse off since 2010.

This includes the cuts in grants, the freeze in council tax and the impact of inflation.

Wolverhampton is the 20th most deprived area in the country according to official figures.

And that is central to the Labour party's argument concerning the cuts. Around 75 per cent of the council's funding comes from Government grants. In better off areas, it is 50 per cent because people in better off areas are less reliant on the council for support. So when the Government cuts the funding, as far as Councillor Lawrence is concerned, it means the areas funded the most by grants are the hardest hit.

The cuts to Wolverhampton's funding were last year said to be equivalent to £203.22 less for the council to spend per head of population. David Cameron told the Express & Star last year:

"If you look at what's happening in terms of local government finance what we're asking Wolverhampton to do this year is only a small reduction in its overall spending power.

"You've got to remember that resources are made up of government grants and council tax payments so it is a small reduction.

"Wolverhampton still gets a lot more than the national average.

Not so says the Labour party in the city. "We have been targeted more than the wealthy areas," Councillor Johnson says.

And by a comparison with other Black Country boroughs, it seems he is right. Walsall, which is 35th on the deprivation list, has lost £181.06 per person. Dudley is 113th and has lost £110.43. Both are still making very deep cuts.

Sandwell is an exception to Councillor Johnson's rule. It is far more deprived than Wolverhampton and comes at ninth on the list, but has £194.22 less to spent per person. That is also not as severe a cut as Wolverhampton.

There are other 35 authorities in the country that have lost out by more than Wolverhampton.

Hull Council oversees the 15th most deprived area of the country, with the loss of £228.36 per person in funding.

And yet it is cutting far fewer jobs than Wolverhampton – 396 in the next year.

In Wolverhampton, Councillor Lawrence says the reason the cuts are so severe here is that the council is planning a long time ahead. The cuts are going on up to 2019.

But that does not make it any easier. At his press conference Councillor Lawrence said: "Each one of these seems to get worse than the last.

"The important thing to recognise is what we're producing is a plan that will go forward through the coming years.

"We will have lost £147m in funding by 2015/16. That's 52 per cent."

As the controlling Labour party cuts library opening hours and plans to strip grant funding from landmarks such as Bantock House and Central Baths, it is also trying to make more money by installing cameras to catch drivers misusing bus lanes.

The opposition Tories and Liberal Democrats do not believe the council needed to make such desperate cuts.

Paul Uppal, the Conservative MP for Wolverhampton South West, was condemned by Labour after he suggested the authority could have got itself a further £6m if it had just done a better job of collecting council tax and business rates.

The MP says the council collected 96.5 per cent of council tax, which was below the national average of 97.4 per cent. He calls the council complacent for not collecting more of what it is owed, rather than cutting services.

Councillor Johnson reminds him about how difficult it is to collect council tax in a deprived area and points out that the authority does not just let people off, it carries on collecting several years worth of money.

The Tories and Lib Dems also want the council to abandon a £15m refurbishment of the Civic Centre.

They say they have never forgotten how the council paid out £33m to settle equal pay claims in 2008 or how it signed up to a multi-million deal to overhaul the back office functions but which the council could not afford even then, almost two years before the coalition came to power. That required a £7.1m pay off to bring to an end.

Would any of this have helped to leave the the council on a sounder footing and prepare it for the coming woes? The council tax will increase in April. But services being offered will be less than those provided at the moment.

The council will try to recruit an army of volunteers to help run libraries, with the warning that these public resources would be shut for most of the week otherwise.

Its staff, those that are not being laid off, will have their working hours cut and thus their pay reduced too. Whether it was ideologically driven politicians, free-wheeling bankers or the people in charge of the council, it was definitely not the front line care workers, librarians or park wardens that caused this mess.

Nor was it the taxpaying public now facing the loss of services they have paid for over many years. Someone, somewhere, either in Wolverhampton or in London has let people down. And we are all going to have to pick up the pieces.