YORK council will fund pledges by working with partners such as other local authorities rather than spending reserves, the authority's leader has said.

Council leader Cllr Claire Douglas appeared to blame the Conservative national government for not providing more support to local authorities during an executive meeting on September 15 to approve her four-year plan.

She told her executive that working with partners in Yorkshire, such as the NHS, universities, and other local authorities, will help City of York Council find the money to spend on public services.

She also accused the previous Liberal Democrat and Green coalition of spending in an unsustainable manner.

“Partnership working is tremendously important,” Cllr Douglas said.

“With dwindling local authority budgets, it’s more and more important that we take advantage of the expertise and both the ability to bring in money from other sources and work with our partners in a broader sense.

“We will be doing an awful lot of that in a way that I think people of York won’t have seen their local authority do before.”

She added: “We are ambitious for our city but we also must recognise and deal with the financial situation we find ourselves in after 13 years of dwindling local government budgets and repeatedly delving into one-off reserves.

“Once reserves are gone, they are gone.

“Spending in this way is not sustainable and cannot continue, no matter what our opposition colleagues think or say, we are determined to tackle this issue.”

City of York Council was projected to overspend by £11.4 million this year and exhaust its reserves if action like increasing car parking charges and charging for green waste services isn’t implemented.

Working with partners and getting funding from the new joint authority for North Yorkshire and York next year will be key, according to Henri Murison, chief executive of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership.

“We haven’t yet had the election for a mayor in York and North Yorkshire so we don’t yet have this source of funding available and the private sector and philanthropy would largely be the ones able to support this laudable initiative,” he said on Labour’s free school meal pledge, which would provide dinners for every primary school child.

“Most of the council’s budget in York is committed to statutory services such as children and adult social care.”

But Liberal Democrat group leader Cllr Nigel Ayre said: “What we have seen here is not getting over the overspend but dealing in a knee-jerk reaction.

“Rushing through a set of cuts as early as possible to inflict as much pain on people and bizarrely targeted at some of our most vulnerable residents.

“It’s not just cruel, it’s counterintuitive.”

The council plan was voted in, with Cllr Douglas saying now “we can move on with our pledges and get going for the city and stop arguing about it".