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

[melba_schmelba]

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.

Thanks for this. Given leasing was so common in those days, I wonder if really freeholders ever paid all the rates for each of their properties, or it just fell on to the occupier? Given from my own researches it seems freeholders often lived vast distances from where their properties were, or were institutions like Oxford Colleges etc. it would seem impractical for a parish to obtain poor rates from them on a regular basis (the parish I have just been looking at collected 3 or 4 times a year).

[melba_schmelba]

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.

Thanks Andy and also everyone else for their contributions. The poor rates I was just looking at (mid 18th century) were charged at 1 shilling in the pound of the annual rent, which later raised to 2 shillings I think by the 1780s. This may seem to confirm my initial suspicions, that non resident freeholders generally did not pay the rates.

"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. "

[David Outner]

In England rates were normally paid by the occupier.  For a very long explanation of who was the occupier see chapters 1 and 2 of "Ryde on Rating" the second (1904) edition of which used to downloadable from Google. Members of the occupier's family were not liable.  Owners were generally not liable, but in some circumstances the owners of low value houses were required to pay under the Small Tenements Rating Act 1850 or other legislation. 

For a detailed explanation of rating in a particular town see https://www.louthlincs1838.org.uk/rating-revaluations/

[Andy J2022]

In England rates were normally paid by the occupier.  For a very long explanation of who was the occupier see chapters 1 and 2 of "Ryde on Rating" the second (1904) edition of which used to downloadable from Google. Members of the occupier's family were not liable.  Owners were generally not liable, but in some circumstances the owners of low value houses were required to pay under the Small Tenements Rating Act 1850 or other legislation. 

David, I hope you don't mind me qualifying that statement by saying 'non resident' owners were generally not liable. I know that's what you meant, but not all Rootschatters read every posting in a thread with the care that they should!

[David Outner]

Andy

Thanks - that was what I meant.  I omitted to mention one further technicality: the legal occupier for rating purposes was not invariably the physical occupier identified by the census enumerator.  If the physical occupier was required by his employment to live in tied accommodation (eg the gardener's cottage in the grounds of a mansion), his employer was often treated as the occupier for rating purposes.

[melba_schmelba]

In England rates were normally paid by the occupier.  For a very long explanation of who was the occupier see chapters 1 and 2 of "Ryde on Rating" the second (1904) edition of which used to downloadable from Google. Members of the occupier's family were not liable.  Owners were generally not liable, but in some circumstances the owners of low value houses were required to pay under the Small Tenements Rating Act 1850 or other legislation. 

For a detailed explanation of rating in a particular town see https://www.louthlincs1838.org.uk/rating-revaluations/

Thanks for this David, I tried to find the book Ryde on Rating online, but without success, but I did find this:

The History of Local Rates in England (2nd edition) by Edwin Cannan MA, 1912
https://archive.org/details/TheHistoryOfLocalRatesInEngland/page/n1/mode/2up

The link about the rates and change in rateable values in Louth over time was also fascinating thankyou. It was interesting to note that it was thought that when they were reassessed the larger houses were thought to often have been undervalued because of the influence of their wealthy owners or occupiers . But I was also surprised that the actual rateable value i.e. in yearly rent often probably had little to do with what was actually paid i.e. in the 1823 valuation it was decided the RV should be only half of open market rents. But rents practically would also vary because people were being given favourable terms by friends or relatives.

[melba_schmelba]

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.

I can now see many entries say Person X for Person Y's house/land etc., so presumably this implies Person X is the occupier and Person Y the freeholder. Several entries also say 'late Person Z's', I am not sure if this means Person Z was once the freeholder but sold it or died, and that the rate payer was the new freeholder, or the rate payer was just a new occupier and it was noting that the freeholder had recently died. Also in several cases, two people are listed as paying the rates, presumably jointly for one house.