As I continued to digest the deeply unpalatable homelessness and housing data that had landed in my inbox, a host of further emails arrived from the same government department. These emails concerned local councils.

The latest batch of alerts from the Department for Levelling Up concerned the many more councils that are now requiring government intervention or are turning to Whitehall for emergency funding as they fear bankruptcy.

We know that Birmingham is facing an existential crisis after effectively going bust, we know Nottingham has seen government commissioners brought in to help with its financial woes. But these were far from the only troubled local authorities mentioned in the latest publications

There were updates on government interventions in Woking, Slough and Thurrock, of a best value notice for Bradford and an external assurance review at Kensington and Chelsea.

On the next email came a list of 20 local authorities now desperately seeking emergency funding packages. These were councils of all political stripes in all regions of the country - from Cheshire to Somerset, from Middlesbrough to Eastbourne.

As I have written many times, there have been undoubted and egregious failures of governance at leadership at some of these local authorities. We only have to look at our own city of Liverpool to see the gross failures that can precede a government intervention.

But looking at these emails, at all of these local authorities in such dire financial situations and it is clear there is something much larger going on.

The Unison union calculated that between 2010 and 2020, the funding supplied to councils from central government was cut by a whopping £16 billion. Here in Liverpool the council has lost around half a billion pounds, equalling 65% of its previous funding streams.

At the same time, local authorities have faced soaring demands, largely in social care but in other key areas like the aforementioned homelessness. It feels after 14 years of the austerity agenda, we are now reaching the nadir of this crisis.

So with all this bad news flooding into my inbox I reminded myself that next week the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, will deliver the government's budget. Surely he will want to address some of these enormous issues and the parlous state of our vital public services?

Well not quite. All the noises coming out of Whitehall are about how Mr Hunt is desperately looking for the fiscal headroom he needs - not to tackle these enormous social issues - but to be able to provide the tax cuts that the Tories believe could give them some electoral hope