Birmingham city council warns of effect of 17% spending cuts Birmingham city council believes around 7,000 jobs may have to go by 2017 as part of the government's austerity cuts. 1,100 job cuts have already been announced. The UK's biggest local authority has warned that the bleak financial outlook for council funding means it will have to make £600m in cuts, potentially reducing its services to core "priority" areas such as adult social care and child protection. Birmingham city council said the scale of the cuts it expected to face over a six-year period marked the "end of local government as we know it." It forecasts it will lose almost half its current controllable expenditure by 2017. It said a combination of government cuts and rising costs meant that by 2017 it would have had to have made cumulative savings of over £600m and shed 7,000 staff since the coalition embarked on its austerity programme in 2011. The Labour-run council's leader, Sir Albert Bore, said that in future there could be no more "salami-slicing" cuts to services and decisions would have be taken as to what the council could no longer afford to provide. He said: "With the extent of the cuts over the past few years and with more to come, we have to start decommissioning services. I am not looking forward to this but it has to be done. The council's annual budget is currently £3.5bn, but because funding for some services, such as education, are ringfenced, any cost savings have to come out of the "controllable" area of the council's budget, currently about £1.2bn. The projections were calculated by an independent finance review carried out for the council by Birmingham Business School, part of the University of Birmingham. It said the council's forecasts "appear to be well-judged" and were consistent with other forecasts. The review said: "We believe that the council should decide not only which services, delivering which priority outcomes, will take precedence in council spending, but also clarify explicitly which current services will not have priority status and which will be decommissioned in the face of the significant budget cuts it faces." The council said it had had no discussions about which services were "priority" and which would have to be decommissioned. But one of the stated key priorities underpinning its budget setting for the next financial year is "safeguarding the most vulnerable." The council said it had already implemented a substantial savings plan, which had resulted in thousands of job losses. It predicts it will have to make £120m in savings next year alone, and may have to lose a further 1,000 jobs on top of the 1,100 already announced. It said: "The council has reached a point where efficiency and transformational savings are becoming even more difficult but there is still a need to significantly reduce expenditure further in order to operate within the constraints of the government cuts and meet the rising social demand created through unemployment, skills shortage and housing needs. The extent of the future financial challenge facing Birmingham will change the landscape of local government not only in Birmingham but nationally - we will have to decommission a number of services. A spokeswoman for the Department for Communities and Local Government said the city's economy would be boosted by new growth incentives. Birmingham is already getting government help to grow its local economy, through a city deal worth £1.5bn, the New Homes Bonus, an enterprise zone and £22m in Growing Places Funding. Amanda Gearing, senior organiser for the GMB union, said: "Cuts of this magnitude are shocking. They show the sheer madness of the Tory-Liberal spending cuts when the economy is in the sixth year of recession, net income per head is down 13% since 2008 and there is mass unemployment.