Councillors have approved the largest cuts to the council’s budget in its history in an effort to prevent bankruptcy.

The Labour administration on Brighton and Hove City Council backed around £30 million in savings, including scrapping a bus route, funding cuts to a domestic violence support service and axing dozens of council positions.

However, the council said the savings prevented cuts to frontline services, including public toilets and libraries.

Councillor Jacob Taylor, the council’s finance lead, said the council had been hit with a “double whammy” of cuts to funding from the Conservative government and “financial incompetence” from the previous Green-led administration.

He said: “This is the hardest budget that this local authority has ever had to face. We take zero pleasure in this Labour administration having to find savings.

“We have spent months and months developing and refining these proposals to try and protect what matters to residents - and to a large extent we have done that.”

Cllr Taylor also announced a new £614,000 fairness fund “to support people who are most struggling in this broken Tory economy”.

He said that the fund would help support local food banks, community groups that are most in need, discretionary payments and towards food vouchers.

Council tax will also rise by 4.99 per cent from April, which will see Band D bills rise by just over £110 a year.

Labour councillors voted in favour of the budget proposals, with the Greens and the Conservatives voting against and Brighton and Hove Independent councillor Bridget Fishleigh abstaining.

Although Green councillors sympathised with the lack of funding offered from the Conservative government, they said the cuts would have an enormous impact on the most vulnerable.

The Greens also criticised Labour councillors for congratulating each other and, in one case, reciting a light-hearted poem moments before voting in favour of “devastating cuts”.

Leader of the Green group on Brighton and Hove City Council Cllr Steve Davis said: “These are Conservative cuts resulting from pathetic and completely insufficient funding from central government, but Labour has a choice over what to cut and what to save. These are Tory cuts, but Labour choices.

“Instead of listening to local charities, trade unions and community organisations, Labour have arrogantly ignored feedback and simply forced through a budget which achieves nothing more than pushing vital local support services to the brink.

“We appreciate the need to pass a balanced budget, but we could not vote for cuts which we know will prove devastating for so many in our city; not when we offered workable and fully fundable alternatives which Labour chose to simply ignore.

“This Labour administration will soon run out of people to blame. When the impact of these cuts begins to be felt - and when an incoming Labour government does nothing to reverse the decimation of public services we have seen under the Tories - every Labour councillor who voted these cuts through will need to take responsibility for the damage they do.”