Poor Rates - were they paid by the owner or occupier?

[melba_schmelba]

I am struggling to find a firm answer to this, genguide says they were paid by the property owners and occupiers, but I am looking through lists of poor rates collected and there is only one person with each property listed?

https://www.genguide.co.uk/source/rate-books-parish/

So perhaps it is the owner, if they were the occupier, but, if not, the renter/leaser if they were in occupation?

[Girl Guide]

I'm inclined to agree with your last remark.

Reading the attachment I formed the opinion that the person who was living in the premises at the time was the person who paid.

Whether that was the owner or the renter is not, I think, the relevant point.

If you think about it in todays terms, those of us who own a house pay rates direct and renters probably pay rates as part of the rent money that they pay to the actual owner of the house.  Does that make sense?

[coombs]

My ancestor lived in a Holborn tenement block which opened in June 1882 and they moved in that year as he first appears on the ratebooks for August 1882. He appears on them until his death in 1888. He was 75 when he died. So I would presume Thomas paid the rates for his room.

[Bookbox]

Everyone would have to pay the rate, unless they were exempt through being in receipt of poor relief themselves.

The rate-books normally record the name of the main householder, who would be responsible for collecting the rate from the other occupiers.

In some rate-books you will find the property-owner’s name listed several times over at different addresses, with the annotation ‘for tenants’.

People who subsequently applied for poor relief might have to show receipts for the rates they’d paid, as evidence to support their residence claims in any parish/union.

[RJ_Paton]

I have an instance (1851 - Scotland) where my ancestor was evicted from a rented house for not paying the poor rate.

[Watson]

Bookbox said: "Everyone would have to pay the rate ..."

It sounds logical as a concept, but I wonder what it means in practice.  How would it apply in an example of a building divided into apartments, where each individual apartment renter is named in the rate-books?  They are obviously "paying the rate", but in what sense is the owner "paying the rate" if there is nothing left to be paid?  Perhaps I have misunderstood.

[Andy J2022]

Just to add to Bookbox's comments above. The amount of rates to be paid were set by the rateable value of the property - a notional figure for the supposed annual rental value of the complete property. So if a property had a rateable value of £20pa¹, and the rate was 4d in the pound, the rates to be collected was  20 x 4 = 6 shillings 8d or 6s/8d. Liability for this sum initially fell on the property owner but if he was not resident at the property it was generally the responsibility of the occupier or tenant to pay the rate. The law was very vague² on the subject and led to many disputes having to be settled by the magistrates³.  Obviously if there were several tenants living in separate households within the property, each would be expected to pay his or her share in proportion to space they occupied (or more likely the rent they paid to the landlord/owner).

In addition to the Poor Rates, there could be rates for the Watch (before police forces were instituted), scavenger rates (for the nightsoil men etc), Highways rates and so on. In some parishes these were all amalgamated into a general rate, in others they were levied separately. Not all parishes levied all these rates. For instance a rural village would not levy scavenger rates and might not have any paved roads to maintain. Also, being isolated it probably had no need of a Watchman.

Although theoretically paying the poor rate in a parish could confer settlement rights on a person, the 1662 Settlement Act required that he was paying over £10 per year in rent for the property. In the early part of the nineteenth century such sums were beyond the average man's earnings, and even in 1840 the average wage of an agricultural worker was only around £25-30 per annum rising to about £40 by the end of the century⁴. Given the large influx of people from the countryside into the towns in the latter part of the nineteenth century, it became increasingly difficult to rigidly apply the settlement rules.


1. This is not dissimilar to today's council tax system, although the tax banding is based on the theoretcial sale value of the property rather than the rental value.

2. See clause 40 of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 for example. That clause was dealing with the eligibility of owners or ratepayers to vote for the Poor Law Guardians, but reflects the dual nature of the liability for the payment of rates.

3. See this article on the LondonLives website.

4. See Arthur Bowley Wages in the United Kingdom in the Nineteenth Century 1900 Cambridge University Press.

[Andy J2022]

Bookbox said: "Everyone would have to pay the rate ..."

It sounds logical as a concept, but I wonder what it means in practice.  How would it apply in an example of a building divided into apartments, where each individual apartment renter is named in the rate-books?  They are obviously "paying the rate", but in what sense is the owner "paying the rate" if there is nothing left to be paid?  Perhaps I have misunderstood.

If the households within a building or tenement each had their own front door they would have been assessed separately. However if a family was renting one or a couple of rooms within a house, then an element of the rent charged by the landlord would reflect the rates due for the property as a whole. I can't point to any specific references to back up my comments, but they seem to accord with both the actual entries found in some rate books, and general practice, even today, concerning lodgers and paying guests.

[coombs]

That same ancestor in my previous post lived in the Old Ford Road in Bow from 1865 to around 1876. In the 1871 census there are 2 families living at his address, and looking at Bow rate books, the Schofield man was the rate payer. He may have been the main rate payer, and my ancestor the other occupier. I think it was a 2 storey terraced house near Five Bells Bridge down Old Ford Road. So perhaps the Schofield family occupied one floor and my lot the other floor.