LABOUR will cut budgets for key Government departments – including local government –year-on-year until the end of the decade, Ed Miliband will announce today.

In a tough message that may alarm party supporters, the Labour leader will order almost all his frontbench team to plan for cuts “until the deficit has been cleared”, which is unlikely to be before 2019.

Aides confirmed those departments will include local government, where town halls in the region are already making huge reductions after Government grants were slashed.

Between 2014 and 2016, councils in the North-East and North Yorkshire are losing £179m, or £1 in every £9 of their ‘spending power’.

And Durham County Council expects to have to save £87.3m between 2015 and 2018, a total that would be much higher if the Labour-run authority had not raided £10m from reserves.

In today’s speech, Mr Miliband will go further than Labour’s previous stance, which was to accept the Coalition’s planned cuts for 2015-16, covering the general election.

He will say: “It won’t just be for the first year. Outside protected areas, for other departments, there will be cuts in departmental spending.

“And we should plan on it being for every year until the current budget is in balance. Today, Ed Balls is writing to our Shadow Cabinet colleagues spelling this out.”

Those protected areas are the NHS – which will receive a £2.5bn boost – and international aid. Schools are likely to be added to that list.

However, Labour argues its tough stance does not mean council cuts in this region will be anything like as harsh as the Coalition’s, because it will:

* “End the bias against our poorest areas” – including the North-East - by introducing a new formula to allocate funds more fairly.

* Devolve £30bn of funding to city and county regions – more than the Coalition is planning and allowing councils to keep increases in business rate revenue.

* Balance the books more slowly than Tory plans for “1930s spending levels”, which would put public services at risk.

The aide said: “Clearly it’s a tough message, but that’s why we’re devolving more spending, because local authority leaders tell us they can spend the money better.”

Labour has yet to say how a fairer formula for local government will be introduced, or when, other than it will be “early” in the next parliament.

In today’s speech, Mr Miliband will rule out any spending commitments that are not fully funded, requiring an increase in borrowing.

And he will attack the Tories for their planned cuts, branding them “an extreme project, motivated by ideology rather than necessity, which will put vital public services at risk”.

Mr Miliband will say: “The Tory plan is to return spending on public services to a share last seen in the 1930s: a time before there was a National Health Service and when young people left school at 14.”