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The Year the Town Hall Shrank

David Nath

James Newton

The Year the Town Hall Shrank: Episode 1: Winners and Losers

Documentaries

Factual: Politics

Episode 1

Episode 1: Winners and Losers

Winners and Losers

BBC Four - The Year the Town Hall Shrank, Winners and Losers

Stoke council faces a £36m shortfall and leader Mohammed Pervez must decide what to chop.

Series looking at Stoke-on-Trent as it struggles with funding cuts. With a 36 million-pound shortfall, council leader Mohammed Pervez must decide what to chop.

Documentary series telling the story of how the city of Stoke-on-Trent struggles to cope with the impact of the largest funding cuts to local government ever imposed by central government.   

The depth of the cuts forces not just the council to reconsider what they do and how they do it, but the people of Stoke to ask themselves what they expect their local authority to do for them. This is not just the story of Stoke, it is the story of us all as it goes behind the rhetoric of whether we are all in it together in this age of austerity, or whether it is right to take tough choices because we have become over-dependent on services that we can simply no longer afford.  

With in-depth access to the council and its decision makers and following the human consequences of decisions taken in the town hall and Whitehall, this is a gripping and moving tale of power, competing priorities and the intimate human costs of cuts recorded over the course of a year.  

The first episode begins in December 2010 as the city council discovers it faces a £36m shortfall to its £210m annual budget. No service is safe from the axe in Stoke.

The leader of the council, Mohammed Pervez, who is leading his own local coalition, is left with the unenviable task of deciding what to chop.

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How Stoke struggles to cope with the impact of funding cuts imposed by central government.

The story of how Stoke-on-Trent struggles to cope with the impact of the largest funding cuts to local government ever imposed by central government.

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The Year the Town Hall Shrank

Episode 1: Winners and Losers

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