The Conservatives are today calling for a rethink of the way local government is funded.

In an interview with ePolitix.com, the shadow local government secretary, Eric Pickles, said the current system is too open to abuse and gave his support to the way Australia finances its councils.

"This is just straightforward pork barrel politics. I am now moving to a view that we should look hard at the way local government grant is distributed," he said.

"I'm beginning to find a degree of attraction to the Australian system where politicians are kept out of it."

He said the current approach was too open to political abuse.

"The system which is under Nick Raynsford is so capable of being fiddled and you can't trust the politicians not to do that," he said.

Ahead of the launch of the party's local election campaign, Pickles said the new funding formula failed to take into account the issues of sparsity and deprivation.

Poor areas in Kent were at a disadvantage to an inner-city area such as Camden, he said.

"Look at somewhere like Camden where there is the same level of poverty but you don't have the same level of density," he said.

"What happens in this system is that Kent's poor people don't count under the new process but the poor in Camden do. I don't think that's fair or right or reasonable."

He accused Raynsford of "living in a world of his own" for claiming Conservative councils had raised taxes because they were not in an election year.

"He's the only person that believes this. I have the consistency of saying what I thought would happen and I was bang-on," said Pickles.

"I talked about 16 per cent average rises and I'm pretty well right. I talked about people on band D paying £1000 for the first time and I was right.

"It comes down to the simple fact that it was pretty obvious that from day one that once Labour made the announcement about changing the way the formula worked and they were taking money away from the counties and moving it to the inner cities, it was bound to happen."

He challenged the minister: "Come on Nick, stop wasting our time. You've gone for local government; you've gone for the Tory authorities and gone for them hard.

"They've got some of the highest increases and you've decided to do this for political reasons. Don't look surprised and don't be a hypocrite."

Pickles admitted past Conservative governments had some responsibility for making councils the creature of central government but the party was now "born again local".

"We've got to decide if we want to see a uniformity of provision of local authorities right across the land. If that's fine then what the government is doing is absolutely right and we should continue with that," he said.

"But if we think local authorities should provide services according to the needs of their local community and should be able to shift priorities about and should be able to provide more then we should be able to pull back from this."

Pickles accepted there was a danger that the May elections could be overshadowed by war but believed voters would focus on local issues.

"If there is a good local issue and if people connect with their local community, slightly more people go out and vote. But if there's war then things do change," he said.

"But I bet you beyond the metropolitan areas in the districts that unless there's something particular about the war I expect it's very much more going to revolve around the 'parish pump' issues rather than oil pumps in the Middle East."