ABSTRACT
It is almost twenty years since the government first adopted an explicit urban policy, recognising that Britain's major cities were suffering disproportionately from poverty of various kinds – poverty which might have politically turbulent implications if nothing was done about it. Since then there have been elements of continuity in the way successive governments have responded. The urban initiatives introduced in the late 1960s had a more explicit concern for people's economic and social welfare. They consisted of a number of separate, small-scale projects and programmes that offered some additional public resources for selected urban neighbourhoods where poverty and deprivation were considered to be particularly severe. Probably the key objective of the government's new urban policy was to strengthen the economies of the inner cities, in particular to encourage the retention of people and jobs.
