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Nottinghamshire County Council has confirmed a further 2,500 jobs will face the axe in a bid make savings. This will be in addition to the 483 posts the council recently said it will cut. It said it is now writing to all employees to ask for expressions of interest in voluntary redundancy “to help minimise the number of compulsory redundancies that need to be made”.

In its first round of cuts, the council said all non front-line temporary staff will be leaving by 1 October, unless agreed by senior officers as “absolutely essential”.

Councillor Kay Cutts, leader of the council, said: "We will protect services as much as we can but we will simply not be able to afford to run things as we do today. Unfortunately, some of the ‘nice to have’ services we may not be able to continue.

"We will provide better value for money by reducing bureaucracy and stripping out layers of managers and administration which will mean the people who are responsible for delivering services will be closer to the people receiving those services.”

The Conservative-led council said it had been forced into the drastic money-saving procedure in order to cut £150m from its annual budget of £484m.

The council said that its position for 2011/12 has “changed significantly” since the budget announcements in February, when reductions of around £36m were estimated.

It has now revealed it needs to save £69m, and blamed rising costs on facilities such as an extra £500,000 on academies, a £9m reduction in its government grant, and a £3.1m increase in inflation.

The council says it needs to find around £150m worth of savings by 2013/14, as some of these increased costs will need to be found year on year.