Shorter opening hours at recycling centres and fewer roads could be gritted as Kent County Council look to save £40m in its budget.

Deputy council leader and finance cabinet member Peter Oakford said the outlook for the county council remained bleak despite the authority getting a further £60m from the government to ease the pressure on its finances.

He said: “The government settlement was better than we expected but a long way short of covering the costs of the expenditure we have, especially in social care.

"We continue to face extraordinary pressures due to inflation and growth in demand for services.

"We have to find £40m worth of extremely challenging savings....we have to increase our income from the charges for some of the services we provide and we plan to raise £16m by doing that.”

The council documents list gritting of roads, household waste recycling centres and libraries among the areas which could be affected.

By reducing the number of roads gritted during spells of bad weather, the authority could save £500,000. The budget plans acknowledge that will result in “reduced network coverage and detrimental impact on Keeping Kent Moving.”

A review into reducing the opening hours of tips is yet to be completed but could save £300,000.

A £200,000 budget cut to libraries "will not mean library closures." The savings will come from ‘back office’ costs - that’s the money spent on administration.

In addition, there will be a one-off reduction in the Libraries Materials Fund - that’s a veto on new books and other items, like DVDs.

Community wardens could have their budget cut by £500,000, but it is unclear how that will impact the number of wardens and the draft budget confines itself to saying only that “a further review” will be undertaken.

Post 16-travel cards are facing another review.

Kent Travel Card could make a saving of £1,018m described as “price realignment to offset an increase in bus operator inflationary fare increases in 2022-23 above the budgeted amount.” This could mean another increase in the cost of the pass, currently £450.

As previously reported, KCC rely heavily on agency staff to plug gaps in social care. They want to address this. It isn't clear how but the authority hopes to make savings of £1m.

Councillors have already voted to not renew a £5m frontline service for rough sleepers and people at risk of becoming homeless. This decision will save £2.3m this year.

Balancing the books would mean the council having to use its reserves - money set aside for emergencies - and “that was not a good place to be," councillor Oakford added.

"The more we take out of reserves the weaker our financial resilience becomes.”

“We have failed to achieve a lot of the savings this year and that puts further pressure on the budget.”

The council had put £12m reserves into this year's budget but that was “a spit in the ocean” compared to the council's gross budget of £1.5bn.

He said a council tax increase of just under 5% had been proposed because the government had made it clear to councils that was expected.

“If we were not to take the full 5%, it would just mean that we would have to make further savings that would have a more negative impact on some of the more vulnerable residents.”

The budget plans are coming under scrutiny at a series of cross-party backbench meetings before a final budget meeting next month.

However, at the first of those meetings this week, councillors were warned that if they chose to scrap some of the proposed savings, the money would have to come from somewhere else.

Cllr Oakford said: “It is all very well to say that we want to reinstate something but that only means we would have to take money from somewhere else and cause further pain.”

“If you are going to have good open scrutiny...frankly, you need far more facts and figures about the impact on the public and on services.”

There was criticism over the budget details from the former leader of the council Sir Paul Carter. He said backbenchers needed more information about the impact of cuts.

“If you are going to have good open scrutiny, which is absolutely imperative in a well run, open authority, frankly, you need far more facts and figures about the impact on the public and on services.”

Among the cuts that county councillors expressed concerns about is a reduction in so-called member grants, which are to be slashed from £10,000 to £3,000.

A proposal to reconsider the cut to these grants was, however, defeated.