ABSTRACT
Local authorities encountered rising poverty when increasing numbers of people qualified for Housing Benefit and, at the end of the decade, many of the poorest were unable to pay their contribution to the Poll Tax. The impact of poverty was experienced by local authority departments with different perceptions of priority groups and different approaches to the poor. It was the need for a more coherent and co-ordinated local approach to poverty that had driven local anti-poverty strategies and the collective efforts of the Association of Metropolitan Authorities (AMA). Liverpool City Council were eager to pursue an initiative that promised greater prominence for poverty-related issues. The Poverty Programme offered a means for creating a 'social' dimension to urban policies which had been developed in a political climate in which social considerations were subordinated to the economic. The need to establish partnership did not derive solely from responses to the poverty programme in the peculiar circumstances of Liverpool.
