John Ransford leaves the representative body for English councils with a warning that the worst of the public sector spending cuts is yet to come and that the UK could be still in the early days of a 10-year – or even 20-year – age of austerity.

"There was a view at the turn of the year that if we could get through the next four or five years, it might not be back exactly to milk and honey, but life would be more predictable," says Ransford, outgoing chief executive of the Local Government Association (LGA). "All the general economic stuff now suggests we will have a decade of this, arguably two decades.

"What we are beginning to see now, and will see a lot more of this winter, is how it really does affect people's lives. It's going to be a very rocky road."

Ransford's leaving do on Thursday has been somewhat delayed. He was due to retire from the LGA three years ago – "it was all signed and sealed" – when the organisation hit a crisis from which it is only now recovering. Ransford agreed to stay on and steady the ship after the sudden departure of his then immediate boss, Paul Coen, but he had no idea that process would coincide with the most brutal spending cuts ever imposed on local government and would mean him enduring personal vilification at the hands of politicians and the media for his £300,000 pay package. He has, he thinks, earned every penny and claims the attack on his pay was a "sting" orchestrated by a government minister.

Ransford, 63, a qualified social worker, has spent most of his career in social services. So he feels keenly the vulnerability of adult social care, which represents more than 40% of all spending by larger councils. As the Audit Commission has just reported, care services have been relatively protected this year – accounting for just 18% of councils' overall savings – but the commission says it is "unsustainable" to continue targeting planning, housing and cultural services for the bulk of cuts as local government absorbs more of the 26% reduction in government grant between 2010 and 2014.

The commission nevertheless found that nine in 10 councils were on track to balance their books this year. Ransford describes this as an "incredible" tribute to the sector, adding waspishly: "I will look with great interest at the outturn figures for central government departments, because all the history shows that they don't meet [cost] reduction targets. There's even a perverse line of thinking that local government always takes the biggest hit because people know how well we cope."

Livid

Some critics charge that the LGA has failed to put up a sufficiently strong defence of local government in the teeth of the spending cuts. Ransford disputes this fiercely, pointing out that the organisation is "politically balanced", and must act in that context, but disclosing that communities secretary Eric Pickles was livid with its response to the government spending review last year.

"Soon after that, we came up with a figure of 140,000 job losses in local government as result of those changes. Eric Pickles said at the time he could get a better estimate on a fag packet. He never gave us an estimate, but said ours was way too high. Now the numbers have all come out in the wash after the end of the financial year, the actual figure is 143,000. Now, first, I don't think that was a bad estimate. Second, it's a devastating indictment of the [grant] reductions."

Other critics, usually but not always from the political right, accuse the LGA of failing to deliver services to councils that are worth the membership fees, which range from less than £10,000 a year for a small authority to some £120,000 for one of the biggest. Here Ransford is prepared to accept that the organisation did not give full value in the past, that it lost touch with what councils wanted from it and that its costs grew too high.

On taking over from Coen in 2009, he was given the task of bridging the gulf between the LGA and its members. He has done so, he says, by bringing what was a sprawling network into one structure and slashing its budget by almost half, from approaching £90m a year to less than £50m – a figure half-funded direct from government. The LGA won the flexibility to spend its government grant according to members' priorities by offering to take a 30% cut; Pickles made it a 38% cut to leave £25m.

"Very few organisations have reduced their costs that quickly and that much," says Ransford. "I would accept that the costs got too bloated – not everyone would accept it, but I do." Three local authorities – Torridge in Devon, King's Lynn and West Norfolk and, within the past few days, North Somerset – have returned to membership having previously quit, leaving just a handful outside the organisation. What looked at one stage like a spreading revolt seems to have been quelled.

As for his own pay packet, Ransford negotiated a two-year contract worth more than £300,000 annually in pay and pension contributions in return for putting off his retirement. It was, he says, appropriate reward for changing his plans and for the big challenge he faced, and was "not particularly out of line" with other packages for top roles in the public sector. It would be considered "peanuts" by some in private industry and finance, he argues, though he adds: "I don't regard it as peanuts; I regard it as high pay."

None of the 400-plus full and associate members of the LGA raised any objection to the package at the organisation's AGM, he says. But he claims that almost at the end of the contract, when the association published a report on pay-setting in local government, Grant Shapps, housing and local government minister, mounted "a quite unfair and unreasonable sting" by contacting national newspapers to point out the terms and call on the LGA to cut them to set an example on "fat-cat pay".

The balloon went up. Characteristically, Ransford stood in the line of fire, agreeing against public relations advice ("They said I'd be slaughtered") to go on television to defend his pay.

Double-dipping

He thought he came away with a score-draw, as he puts it, but days later a group of 30 leading councillors wrote to the Times to condemn the terms – "and that was really serious for us", he says. Within hours – though Ransford insists this had long been the intention – it was disclosed that he would do a third year on a much reduced rate of "less than £100,000" with no pension contribution. He was, in fact, retiring and coming back as a consultant, a practice dubbed "double-dipping" that Pickles has vowed recently to eradicate. However, the furore was instantly silenced.

The LGA's new chief executive, Carolyn Downs, formerly chief executive of the Legal Services Commission and before that of Shropshire county council is being paid £169,000. Ransford, who is to take a long holiday in New Zealand, "as far from Westminster as it is possible to go", and to pursue his love of theatre, likes to think he has built a stage for his successor.

"I've done the heavy lifting, I've given it my all," he says. "It's for others now to perform on that stage. That's the next test."