In this chapter, I examine social purity's post-war decline in Liverpool in terms of broader, national challenges to the work of organizations like the LVA. While Liverpool's Women Police Patrols had joined with the city's main police force in 1948, and the House of Help had closed their doors by the end of the 1960s, the LVA's survival until 1976 requires closer attention. I want to show that in order to understand the eventual decline of the LVA, we need to examine the state's involvement in the control of prostitution from the 1950s onwards. My analysis of the slow decline of the LVA over these decades draws upon research into associational life and citizenship in the post-war years. Historians have increasingly begun to question the extent to which the post-war welfare state rendered voluntarism and philanthropy obsolete. James Hinton notes that the ‘ongoing professionalization of social work in the welfare state placed a question mark over the continuing relevance of the kind of voluntary work traditionally undertaken by middle-class housewives’. Yet Hinton also identifies the 1960s as a period of growth for the voluntary sector, with new campaigning organizations like Child Poverty Action Group (1965) and Shelter (1966) emerging. More recently, Anna Bocking-Welch has pointed to the ways post-war volunteering was increasingly promoted towards young people as a form of citizenship, while Pat Thane has emphasized the long coexistence of public and private welfare initiatives. Moreover, Chris Moores’ work on the rise of Neighbourhood Watch in the 1980s shows that there was still an appetite for late-Victorian-inspired ‘voyeurism’ in terms of the social control of urban spaces even after groups like the LVA and the BVA (formerly the NVA) had ceased to patrol.

This raises questions about why the specific forms of moral patrolling practised by the likes of the LVA and the BVA faded from public life during the post-war years and why, despite there still being space for charitable and philanthropic organizations to exist alongside the post-war welfare state, the LVA and BVA closed. In response to this, I argue that we cannot ignore that the state had increasingly begun to supervise and intervene in prostitution prevention and control by the end of the 1950s in a way that closed out social purists.