Darlington Borough Council should be seeking more help from central government to keep council tax down, a Conservative councillor has claimed.

The council's Labour leader, Councillor John Williams, has already said that the authority is proposing to increase council tax by 9.5 per cent.

He said that the increase was necessary to avoid losing such facilities as the Dolphin Centre and Civic Theatre.

But Conservative group leader Councillor Tony Richmond said that the borough's council tax had gone up 42 per cent since Labour came to power in 1997.

"We have repeatedly in the past asked the Labour council to hold meetings with Government ministers to find a solution to this problem of underfunding, which results in increasing the council tax by such large amounts, and they refuse to do so," he said.

"We need to get Government funding increased. Every year the council uses these scare tactics by saying, if we don't raise taxes, services will be lost, and last year it rose by 12.5 per cent.

"The residents of Darlington pay their national taxes to the Government so let us have some of it back."

Coun Williams said Coun Richmond was being hypocritical, and blamed the problems on the previous Tory Government.

"Under Labour we have had far better resources than under the Tories, when year after year councils were billions of pounds short on a national basis," he said.

"We were forced to drop the council tax, taking £3.6m away from Darlington, and we are still dealing with that fall-out."

He said: "The Government is not receiving individual representations from any individual councils on this, but what we are doing is backing the Regional Councils' Association, which is making representations to the Government about various aspects of the settlement.