Communities Secretary Eric Pickles has asked the NCVO to feed in to him personally, any examples of disproportionate or unfair local authority cuts to voluntary sector budgets.

And he has promised NCVO’s chief executive, Sir Stuart Etherington, that he will write to Nottinghamshire County Council about the extent of its funding cuts to the local sector.

According to the NCVO, Pickles made the commitment in a phone call with Sir Stuart last night.

Sector bodies have been lobbying Pickles to intervene in Nottinghamshire for several weeks – late last year the then-Navca chief executive Kevin Curley wrote to him requesting that he take up the matter with the Council’s leader Kay Cutts, and ask her to look again at the budget proposals and reinstate some of the funding.

The budget for supporting the sector in 2010/11 was £3.2m. The following year, it was cut to £1.4m, a reduction of 56 per cent.

The affected charities were unable to use the Department for Communities and Local Government’s Best Value Statutory Guidance to challenge the decision because the council’s new budget was set before publication of the guidance.