Labour Party leadership candidates waded into the debate about the impact of public spending cuts on the region as they joined local members on the campaign trail in Exeter.

Polling day in the city council elections brought the five MPs contesting the leadership election to Devon for hustings in front of grassroots activists.

Before hitting the streets with volunteers in an effort to mobilise voters in Exeter, they went head to head to win the votes of party members in the ballot to decide which of them becomes leader of the opposition. Diane Abbott, Ed Balls, Andy Burnham and brothers David and Ed Miliband spent almost an hour being quizzed by an audience at Exeter Labour Party headquarters in Clifton Hill.

It came as economists at the South West Regional Development Agency warned that up to 116,000 jobs could go across the region over the next five years as a result of budget cuts.

Ed Miliband said: "What the coalition doesn't seem to understand is that when they make cuts to things like building schools for the future, it isn't just bad for our children's education, it's bad for private sector jobs.

"It's the cavalier way they are going about these cuts which is going to be damaging to the region. What we need to be doing is showing that there's an alternative."

Mr Balls said: "We need more people in jobs paying tax — that's the way to get the deficit down. It's economic lunacy to be cutting public spending and investment now. It will hit the private sector really hard. We should be cutting the deficit in a more steady way and getting people into work. You can't cut your way out of recession — you need to invest your way to recovery."

David Miliband lamented the scrapping of plans for a unitary council in Exeter by the Government, saying it "sticks in the gullet" five years after he launched the drive to create unitary councils.

Welcoming the visit of his party's five leadership contenders, Exeter MP Ben Bradshaw said: "They share our anger locally at the way that Exeter has been treated by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Government, with the taking away of our unitary status and imposing on us these expensive, unnecessary and unwanted elections we are having today."