Youth organisations that have benefited from a rent subsidy for years will see the funding withdrawn by the council in an effort to save £57,000-a-year.

The Dual Use scheme, which has been active for more than 20 years, is currently assisting 11 organisations including the Brownies, Richmond Music Trust and Teddington’s Youth Action Theatre (YAT) cover the cost of renting school facilities, but will be withdrawn in July 2015.

Youth Action Theatre, which was founded in the 1970s and counts The Office star Martin Freeman among its patrons, has been using the facilities at Collis and Teddington schools for rehearsals for more than 40 years and receives a rent subsidy of £9,925 from the scheme.

Chairman Bill Compton said: "If we lost that rehearsal space it would have the potential to break us completely.

"We have a great relationship with Collis School and YAT has been rehearsing on the premises for more than 40 years.

The organisation, which Martin Freeman credits with launching his acting career, offers membership without charging its participants, and Mr Compton said to do so would go against YAT’s ethos.

The not-for-profit organisation, which survives by making money from selling tickets to its shows, would need to find the whole sum annually to afford the rent when the scheme ends.

Mr Compton said: "The extra money has got to come from somewhere and it’s quite an upheaval. For us it’s about an 80 per cent mark-up for the cost of our shows.

"There is the option of putting our ticket prices up, but we don’t want to do that to our audiences and could lose some audience members."

Deputy leader of the council, Geoffrey Samuel, said youth organisations, which have been given a year’s notice of the changes, have a number of options, including negotiating with the schools for reduced rents.

He said: "The scheme dates back more than 20 years and like many things of that kind is full of anomalies, the basis of which is very hard to unravel.

"Its total cost in the last year was around £57,000 and let’s make no bones about the fact that every single year we have to make savings and will continue to do so, and the vital thing is to protect the major front line services.

"One option the organisations have is to find financial sponsorship elsewhere; another is to find alternate premises.

"The third is to negotiate with the schools, whose reserves have doubled to £14m. What a school may be able to do is offer a lower rent to a small number of organisations it can help subsidise."

Twickenham’s Calvary Chapel has received the subsidy to cover for weekly use of Twickenham Academy for seven years, and Pastor Rob Dingman is grateful for the support the council has offered the organisation.

He said: "It’s going to effectively double our rent, but the council doesn’t owe us a dime so there’s really nothing to complain about.

"I expected to lose it earlier, so the fact that we have benefited from the scheme for so long is great. Those guys have been nothing but good to us."