The aims and principles of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act.

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Juliet Bradley.                                                                                                      SP1104

Module tutor – Stephen Cunningham.

The aims and principles of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act.

In the decades prior to the national reform of the Poor Law in 1834, the characterisations of the administration were of variety rather than uniformity. The social and economic changes at this time produced many problems for those that were responsible for the social welfare. Many areas throughout the country though found solutions to this problem within the legal frame-work of the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1597-1601.

In the initial stages the amendment act was set up to reduce the amount of poor rates that were being paid. In the first ten years of the amendment act the amount of relief being paid was reduced to a national average of four million to five million a year.

One of the principles of the amendment act was to encourage the ‘poor’ to work for what they received because poverty was looked upon as the fault of the individual, so therefore the amount of relief that was payable was set at a rate that was lower that the lowest paid labourer. This was enforced to dissuade people from claiming benefits, so in the mid to late 1800’s many workhouses were built to house the poor and thus forcing them to work, often in squalid conditions.

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This is a quote by the assistant poor law commissioner:

        “Our intention is to make the workhouses as like prisons as possible… our object is to establish therein a discipline so severe and repulsive as to make them a terror to the poor”. (Thompson, 1963, p. 295).

Although in previous years the able bodied would wander from parish to parish to gain more relief for themselves, the taxpayers wanted this to stop. They were very resentful of having to pay huge amounts of tax to supplement the poor.

The idea of the workhouse was to ensure that the ...

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