WIRRAL's council leader has warned the spending review announced by Chancellor George Osborne in his autumn statement today will have 'significant ramifications' on the authority's budget. 

Mr Osborne has promised to deliver 'economic and national security" in a review which sets out how he plans to spend £4 trillion of taxpayers' money over the next five years.

He will set out this afternoon how he intends to slice £20 billion from spending and £12 billion from welfare - as well as raising £5 billion in a crackdown on tax avoidance - to meet his commitment to achieve budget surplus by 2020.

Council leader Phil Davies said: "We will be looking at the Chancellor’s Spending Review and Autumn Statement carefully as they are announced today.

"They have significant ramifications for our budget over the next five years, and our current preparations to set next year’s budget.

"The Local Government Association is already saying that cuts to council budgets cannot continue, and local authorities, particularly in the North of England, are facing a situation where services are under pressure.

"On top of cuts already made to core grant funding, which has hit deprived local authorities in the North particularly hard, we are facing more and significant pressures on our services.

"We will continue to deal with these significant financial challenges by looking at delivering services differently in order to address our reductions in funding but inevitably any more cuts to our budget will mean that a number of key services will be dramatically affected."

The Chancellor has put boosting property ownership at the heart of the review, to be unveiled alongside the annual Autumn Statement in the House of Commons.

He will pledge to "turn generation rent into generation buy" with plans for 400,000 new homes in England in the largest affordable housebuilding programme in more than 30 years.

But the Chancellor's statement will also detail some of the deepest cuts to public spending in recent memory, with police forces expected to be among the highest-profile losers.

And he will reveal how he will soften the impact of planned cuts to tax credits, after the House of Lords threw out his proposal for £4.4 billion worth of reductions from April next year.

There is speculation he will phase the cuts in, or trim housing benefit in order to share the burden more widely.