IN excess of 300 Town Hall job losses, cuts of up to 50 percent on average in each of the directorate budgets. That’s the doomsday message from Liverpool Mayor Joe Anderson as he grapples with working out his spending budget for the coming year.

Mayor Anderson will get the blame for doing to dirty work of Cameron, Osborne and Pickles, the gang of three heaping financial misery on Liverpool

Many libraries will issue their last books, day centres for adults will be cut, a significant number of council-run children’s centres will also go. School lollipop men and women will go – unless schools themselves pay their wages.

When Mayor Anderson walks from his Dale Street office to the Town Hall on March 5 to seek approval for his three-year savings plan, he can expect to run a very vocal and angry gauntlet.

He will get the blame for doing to dirty work of Cameron, Osborne and Pickles, the gang of three heaping financial misery on Liverpool.

Yet, at a briefing to explain how he intends to balance the books, the Mayor had this to say: “I don’t believe David Cameron is a nasty evil man. He just doesn’t understand.”

So what is it that the Prime Minister doesn’t understand, and why is Liverpool suffering from Government spending cuts more than any other local council in Coalition England?

The amount of money handed to each council by the Government each year is determined by an historic funding formula. More than 75 percent of the money spent by the council comes from Westminster. Some UK councils receive hardly anything – because they raise enough money through their Council Tax.

But in Liverpool less than 10 percent of its budget is raised by the Council Tax.

Behind the complicated mathematics, Liverpool suffers worse because it has more houses in the lowest band A group than anywhere else. On average in England, fewer than a quarter of properties fall into band A. In Liverpool it is almost 61 percent.  It is a similar story in bands B, C and D.

In a nutshell, there just aren’t enough posh houses and penthouse flats in Liverpool to boost the increasingly bare Town Hall coffers.

In Liverpool just 2.3 percent of houses are in band E (larger semis or detaches houses), compared to an England average of almost 10 percent. The variation continues until the highest banded property – H – with just 120 owners of the big posh houses in the city paying the top whack.

There are 200,000 houses, flats and bungalows in the city, a land of far too many “Coronation Street” type properties– around 122,000 terraced houses and small flats in the cheapest band.

If the council was to fund its services through the Council Tax alone there would have to be 1.5m of these terraced street houses in the city.

So when the Government turns off the funding tap, the inevitability is Liverpool is the first to suffer from a crippling financial thirst.

When David Cameron took over the tenancy of 10 Downing Street in 2010, Liverpool received almost £515m from Whitehall. The figure has fallen every year and by 2016/17 will be £273m.

When inflation is factored in, it represents a massive drop of more than half of what it used to be.

The council can’t put the Council Tax up, apart from a fraction, and even if the money raised by parking charges, fixed penalty notices and other income increases, it won’t even make a dent into the black hole.

The talk is Chancellor George Osborne will force councils to have a referendum if they want to increase the council charge by more than 1.5 percent, and there will be an upper cap anyway to outlaw massive rises.

And this is why Liverpool is in a pickle.  A rise of just under 1.5 percent would only raise around £1.5m, and Mayor Anderson in the coming year is staring at a government cut to the city of £45m in 2014/15. In 2016 the cut will be £63m and in 2017 a reduction of £48m.

You don’t have to be”good at sums” to realise it just adds up to three years of misery, and in many cases heartache for the people of Liverpool.

Despite the gloom and doom, Mayor Anderson insists the best years for the city are yet to come. But that won’t happen during the reign of David Cameron.