John Simmonds, Kent County Council's (KCC) cabinet member for finance, said: "First of all it's over three years, the second thing is the annual wastage of people who leave the authority for a variety of reasons is 11% to 12%.

"We're talking about 1,000 people a year who actually leave the authority."

'Human cost'

He added: "This isn't an idea we've suddenly hit upon. For quite a while now we have not been filling certain vacancies so we've actually being doing some preparation for this as well.

"The human cost won't be anything like the figures we are talking about. But what we are talking about in the longer term is that there will be about 700 less jobs but it doesn't mean 700 people are going to lose their jobs."

Trudy Dean, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, said: "We're looking at very difficult circumstances indeed for local authorities. Whether we need to make 700 redundancies is a bit more puzzling.

"The county council has always said it is a very efficient. If that's true and we can get rid of 700 people without affecting frontline services as they claim then they must have been sitting around twiddling their thumbs.

"My experience is that councils always claim that redundancies will not affect frontline services and the reality is that at the end of the day people don't get the same level of service as they got before."