ABSTRACT
Local authorities needed more effective policies to cope with rising poverty. The Third Poverty Programme addressed an agenda current throughout the UK. The most striking feature of Balloch and Jones's review of local authority anti-poverty strategies is the extent to which in the 1980s local authorities were trying to cope with the effects of government disinvestment. By the beginning of 1990 the partnership also included the Granby Toxteth Task Force, the university and the Liverpool Health Authority. Representatives of the several agencies were to found the Management Committee of the Liverpool Poverty Programme. The need to establish partnership did not derive solely from responses to the poverty programme in the peculiar circumstances of Liverpool. Establishing partnership itself becomes the major problem of the project. In the Liverpool circumstances, there were disincentives for the public sector agencies to work on the question of partnership.
