“WOULD the last person to leave please turn out the lights.”

That was the doomsday-like warning over council services from one North-East mayor last night, as a heavyweight campaign against Government spending cuts gathered pace.

In The Northern Echo on Monday, the region’s councils launched a fightback against the coalition’s budget reductions, warning if ministers pressed ahead, local authorities could collapse.

Seizing on a report claiming popular council services could be history by 2020, town hall chiefs are calling for a debate on what Chancellor George Osborne’s £123bn austerity programme will mean.

Last night, Hartlepool Mayor Stuart Drummond said: “It will be like: would the last person to leave please turn out the lights.

“We provide vital services to some of the most vulnerable people in the country and it’s these services that will be affected.

“We’ve managed to cut £14m but there’s nowhere else to go. There will be a huge change in what we could provide.

People will be in for a shock.”

Bob Cook, Labour leader of Stockton Borough Council, said unless a funding solution was found for adult social care, expected to swallow 45 per cent of council budgets by 2020, there would be “dire circumstances”.

“It will be things people enjoy most, such as leisure centres and parks, that disappear,” he said.

George Dunning, Labour leader of Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council, said his authority, which runs 13 libraries and five leisure centres, was “hanging on by our finger nails”.

“We’re going to see local authorities providing statutory services only,” he said.

Grant Davey, Labour opposition leader on Northumberland County Council, said with forecasts that nearly a third of his county’s population will be over 65 by 2033, the Government was creating a “perfect storm”.

The claims come as new figures reveal the North-East is suffering the largest drop in planning and development spending outside London, at 16.1 per cent this year.

However, Conservative Local Government Minister Bob Neill said local government accounted for a quarter of all public spending and it needed to help cut the national deficit left by Labour by sharing offices, getting more for less, spending reserves, tackling fraud or cutting management and overheads.