BRADFORD Council should cut office cleaning, trade union subsidies and climate change work to keep funding local libraries and community centres, the Tories have said.

The opposition Conservative group at Bradford Council has set out its alternative budget proposals ahead of a meeting tonight where councillors will decide how to plug a £61.5m gap in the authority's finances by 2018.

It includes the suggestion that office cleaning should be reduced to two days a week, rather than the Labour group's plan to cut it to three days a week, to save an extra £150,000 over two years.

The Conservatives would also abolish the authority's environment and climate change service, saving £214,000, restructure the human resources department, saving £928,000, and remove wages for trade union reps as well as making unions pay to collect subscriptions through the authority's payroll department, saving £257,000.

The Tories' alternative budget would see weekly general waste collections kept on.

It would scrap planned cuts to libraries and safeguard rental subsidies and rate relief for community groups and sports clubs.

Conservative group leader Councillor Simon Cooke said there was still a "significant amount of back office bureaucracy" where savings could be made.

He said: "I find it hard to understand why the Executive’s original budget proposals, suggested that it was necessary to sound the death knell for numerous libraries, sports clubs and community centres by removing their subsidies, drastically reduce the number of roads to be gritted and consign weekly bin collections to history, in order to save about £1.5m, at a time when the council still spent approximately £9m on human resources and policy sections alone.

"We even found that there was enough capacity to take out some back office in order to spend £750,000 on potholes, which I think everyone would agree is much more important."

The Liberal Democrat group has decided not to put forward any amendments to the Labour-led council's budget at today's meeting, its leader, Councillor Jeanette Sunderland said.

She said she "fundamentally disagreed" with so much in Labour's budget, that there was no way they could amend it - and confirmed they would not be supporting it when it came to the vote at tonight's meeting.

But she said the Labour group could make savings by cutting councillors' allowances by £300,000 "without any difficulty whatsoever".

Cllr Sunderland also suggested it should stop subsidising the price of tickets at its theatres, and voiced concerns about the money it was handing over to the West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA) - the body which brings together local councils to look at West Yorkshire's economy and transport network.

The meeting of the full council takes place at 4pm today in City Hall's council chamber.