The leader of Kent County Council has warned more authorities could go bust without a cash injection from the government.

Cllr Paul Carter (Con), who is also chairman of the County Councils Network, said ministers needed to act to prevent councils becoming crippled by the need to make millions of pounds of savings because of cuts in government grants.

He said councils faced “truly unpalatable” decisions as they tried to balance the books. In the case of KCC, the authority was looking to make savings of £30m next year when it had already “scraped the barrel".

His warning coincides with a report highlighting that KCC could be short of nearly £4bn needed to pay for infrastructure over the next decade and beyond.

Mr Carter said: “County authorities have delivered extraordinary savings over the past eight years of austerity, helping to restore the public finances of this country. But costs outside of our control and demand for services, such as adults and children’s social care, are adding additional unfunded costs of £1.5bn to our budgets over the next two years.

“Recent research clearly shows that councils will need additional support next year. We will work hard to deliver the savings required this year, but the scope for making deliverable savings has dramatically reduced and decisions for next year will be truly unpalatable if we are to fulfil our statutory duties. Without additional resource, the worst is yet to come.

“Counties want to work with the government. We need to start a sensible conversation with ministers this summer to provide sufficient short-term resources for the next financial year, ahead of a longer-term deal in the Spending Review.”

The pressure on county council budgets has been more acute because of the increasing numbers of elderly and vulnerable people needing care from social services.

“You can't keep making more savings on top of more savings without consequences and the government needs to know that,” said Mr Carter.

Professor Richard Scase of the University of Kent said that as the largest county, KCC faced huge challenges caused by a growing population and the need to look after more vulnerable adults.

He argued that the time had come to revisit the idea of breaking the county up into different unitary authorities.

Speaking on KMTV’s Paul On Politics programme, he said: “There must be something wrong with the structure of local government in this country and the relationship with central government.

"It is probably time for a review of the whole structure. There must be all sorts of inefficiencies and overlaps in the dual system that we have in Kent.”