You will soon have to be more sensible about how much you drink during a day out in Gravesend as several public toilets in the town centre are facing the axe.

Government cuts mean Gravesham council needs to find savings of £10,000 per working day by 2019 and cabinet members approved proposals to flush £76,000 from its amenities budget at a meeting on Monday.

Loos in Clive Road, convenient for commuters heading out of Gravesend railway station, and Parrock Street will close at a combined saving of almost £40,000.

The Clive Road toilets are leased by the council from Thamesgate Shopping Centre and more than £7,000 was spent in 2016 to repair cubicles and replace fittings due to vandalism. Drug use and sexual activity is also a problem.

Toilets in the recently re-opened Gravesend Borough Market would become one of only two council-run ones in the town centre. The others are in the civic centre.

The council is hoping to partner with shops and pubs to make their toilets available to the public, even if they aren’t spending money there.

Deputy council leader Cllr David Turner (Con), who chaired Monday’s meeting, said: “We will be talking to shops and pubs to promote a community scheme, which would see signs put up on doors to say, ‘these toilets are public’.

“There will be no reduction really in the number of toilets, but there will be savings of £76,000.”

Outside of town, the council will save more than £13,600 by closing toilets in Perry Street, Northfleet, another £9,000 by shutting those in Meopham Green, and just over £8,600 by getting rid of loos in The Street, Cobham.

All of them could be gone by March 31, but public loos in Gordon Promenade, Fort Gardens, Windmill Gardens, Woodlands Park, and Camer Park in Meopham, will remain open. None will close until talks have been held with shops about the community scheme.

In addition to the £76,000 saved by agreeing to shut the toilets, the council also secured an additional £184,000 of revenue by upping car parking fees by 30p across all tariffs, from a one-hour stay all the way up to 24 hours.

The council has nine car parks and eight are pay and display, where charges apply Monday to Saturday, 8am to 6pm. These are the Gurdwara, Horn Yard, Market Square, Milton Place Street, Ordnance Road, Parrock Street, Rathmore Road and West Street.

Parking at any of these will soon cost £1.10 per hour and up to £6.80 for the day in the most expensive, central car parks — up from 80p and £6.50 respectively — but overall the fares are still below the county average.

The cuts approved on Monday — which followed £500,000 of cuts approved back in November, including the shutting of Towncentric and scaling down of the council’s Christmas events programme — did not stop there.

Cllr Leslie Hills said “the name of the game at the moment is financial survival”, as cabinet members moved on to identify savings by sharing some of the council’s services with other local authorities.

Its revenues and benefits service will be shared with Tonbridge & Malling Council, which would save £100,000, and a 24/7 CCTV service with Medway Council, saving around £64,000.

Another £60,000 will be saved with the introduction of a new paperless system to save on printing, postage and processing of paper documents, with one cabinet member noting how the council recently spent 46p processing a cheque a woman had made to pay 40p of her council tax bill.

Proposals are also being drafted to save more money on planning, regeneration, customer and theatre services, and the council’s maintenance and repairs workforce. These could be considered as early as the next cabinet meeting on January 30.

“We’re in tricky times and just don’t know what’s going to be thrown at us" Cllr Samir Jassal

Cuts need to be made by councils across the country because support grants from the government, which will be halved from £1.2 million next year, will be completely halted in April 2019.

The lack of funding has been exacerbated by an unexpected annual reduction of £750,000 to Gravesham council’s New Homes Bonus, a scheme started by the government to encourage local authorities to build houses through financial incentives.

The New Homes Bonus reduction came after Sajid Javid, the government’s communities and local government secretary, transferred £240 million from its budget to adult social care funding.

Cllr Samir Jassal, Gravesham council’s cabinet member for business development, admitted: “We’re in tricky times and just don’t know what’s going to be thrown at us.”

Cllr Turner added: “With the announcements made by the government in December the council’s need for savings has only grown further and means that difficult decisions have had to be made in order to continue to deliver frontline services for our residents.”