MORE painful cuts will have to be made to council services in the years to come, a meeting heard yesterday.

Bradford Council’s Executive met at City Hall to pore over the authority’s finances.

The meeting heard that its annual budget had already shrunk by £172.6m since 2010, and would have to be cut by around a further £100m in the next six years.

Finance director Stuart McKinnon-Evans said the authority had managed to balance its books last year by making the required savings.

Council leader Cllr Susan Hinchcliffe said: “We have lost £172.6m over the last six years, so that gives you some scale of what has already been cut back.

“The fact that we have achieved budget this year is good but that’s not without pain being felt across the district to our citizens.

“We as councillors feel that quite keenly.”

Cllr Hinchcliffe warned that the authority would have to take more “difficult decisions” in the years to come, and that the council would have to “stop doing” some of the things it currently does.

Cllr Hinchcliffe mentioned the vote for Brexit, saying people in the North had felt “completely left behind”, and said she hoped new Prime Minister Theresa May would put “some real investment into the North of England”.

The committee also discussed the council’s performance against a series of targets, from school results to across its departments, although the meeting heard some of the data, such as school Ofsted ratings, was out of date.

Councillors also said some of the targets were unrealistic and did not recognise areas of progress, such as improving infant mortality levels, obesity rates in 45-year-olds and tooth decay in five-year-olds.

They asked for an updated list of targets to be developed.

The report showed 17 of the targets were being hit, 17 were being missed and nine were “within acceptable variance”.

Performance was improving in 22 areas, deteriorating in 17 areas and had not changed in three areas.

Areas where performance was below target, and getting worse, included: the number of sick days taken per Bradford Council employee, excluding school staff; the proportion of the working-age population qualified to at least NVQ level 3 and the amount of household waste being sent for re-use, recycling or composting.