Poor Relief Act 1662

14 Car 2 c 12, also sometimes described as the Settlement Act or Act of Settlement and Removal, was passed in 1662 by the Cavalier Parliament. Its full title reads “An Acte for the Better Releife of the Poore of this Kingdom”.

History

Since the Poor Law Act of 1601 (for details see Poor Laws), each parish had become responsible for collecting so-called poor rates (a tax on property) with the help of which they were to provide relief for the poor. Some parishes were more generous than others which had the effect that many poor people moved there. This then put a strain on the ratepayers. In December 1661 and January 1662, four Bills concerning poor relief were introduced. The whole issue was then given over to a committee which drafted a single bill including certain aspects from the four original bills. The bill passed between the Houses and was finally agreed upon in May 1662

Content

The Act said that every person had a place of settlement (i.e. one particular parish) allocated to them. If they got in need of Poor Relief, they could go to the respective overseer. If, for one reason or another, they wanted to leave their home parish (the parish they had been born into), the parish was supposed to hand out a Settlement Certificate. People usually stayed in their home parish, because these were often unwilling to issue Settlement Certificates, since this meant that in case the person got in need of Poor Relief and was too sick or poor to make the way back home, the home parish had to pay for costs that arose from getting them there. But people did not have to stay in their home parish for the rest of their life. If they fulfilled one or more of the following conditions, they could gain the right to claim another parish as their place of settlement:

• had married into a parish
• were holding an office in a parish
• had been employed in a parish for over a year and a day (this often led to short-term employment contracts)
• had completed a full apprenticeship at one of the parish residents'
• had received poor relief in that parish before
• rented a property worth £10 per year or paid taxes on a property worth £10 per year

Problems

The Act was very burdensome for the parishes. "Parishes had to keep bundles of settlement certificates and approach justices for removal orders; sessions had to hear appeal after appeal against removal and deal with disputes between parishes" (Slack 37). Sometimes home and host parish were part of the same town, or neighboring parishes, which made the additional workload seem even more absurd (ibid.). Also, the Act with all its bureaucratic baggage did not encourage unemployed and poor people to look for work in other places. Crowded places with a high unemployment density were now even more likely to stay that way.

Reasons

The preamble to the Act claims that "by reason of some defects in the law, poor people are not restrained from going from one parish to another, and therefore do endeavour to settle themselves in those parishes where there is the best stock, the largest commons or wastes to build cottages, and the most woods for them to burn and destroy; and when they have consumed it, then to another parish, and at last become rogues and vagabonds [...]." This, however, cannot be backed by available evidence: contemporary documents show a migration away from sparsely populated areas in the direction of bigger cities. These cities had neither stock, nor commons, wastes or wood surpluses (Webb 323-5).

The Act hindered migration, but did not downright forbid it. People, especially able-bodied workers, could still move in between parishes. It was rather the (already) poor people who were hindered: they were strongly deterred from claiming relief in another parish for fear of being removed or they were not handed a certificate in their home parish in the first place (because of the 'removal' costs) (Slack 38).

Text of the Act

http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=47315

Sources

• http://www.victorianweb.org/
• Slack, Paul. The English Poor Law, 1531-1782. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990.
• Webb, Sidney, and Beatrice Webb. English Poor Law History, Part 1: The Old Poor Law. English Local Government Volume 7. London: Cass, 1963.