The Representation of the People Act 1832 (2 & 3 Will. 4. c. 45), also known as the Reform Act 1832, Great Reform Act or First Reform Act, was an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom to reform the electoral system in England and Wales and to expand the male franchise, but excluded women from voting. The measure was brought forward by the Whig government of Prime Minister Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey.
The legislation granted the right to vote to a broader segment of the male population by standardising property qualifications, extending the franchise to small landowners, tenant farmers, shopkeepers, and all householders who paid a yearly rental of £10 or more. The act also reapportioned constituencies to address the unequal distribution of seats. The act formally excluded women from voting, as a voter was defined in the Act as a male person; prior to 1832 there were occasional, rare, instances of women voting. The act of England and Wales was accompanied by the Scottish Reform Act 1832 (2 & 3 Will. 4. c. 65) and Irish Reform Act 1832 (2 & 3 Will. 4. c. 88).
The act was repealed by the Representation of the People Act 1948. The electoral system in the UK is now defined principally by the Representation of the People Act 1983 and the Electoral Administration Act 2006.
Before the reform, most members of Parliament nominally represented boroughs. However, the number of electors in a borough varied widely, from a dozen or so up to 12,000. The criteria for qualification for the franchise also varied greatly among these boroughs, from the requirement to own land, to merely living in a house with a hearth sufficient to boil a pot.
The Irish Reform Act 1832 (2 & 3 Will. 4 c. 88) brought similar changes to Ireland, and the separate Scottish Reform Act 1832 (2 & 3 Will. 4 c. 65) was revolutionary, enlarging the electorate by a factor of 13 from 5,000 to 65,000.
The historiography of the Reform Act is marked by longstanding debates over its causes, nature, and impact. Scholars have long grappled with whether it was a radical modernising movement that expanded democracy by widening the franchise or a conservative measure intended to preserve aristocratic rule by making necessary concessions.
After the Acts of Union 1800 became law on 1 January 1801, the unreformed House of Commons comprised 658 members, of whom 513 represented England and Wales. There were two types of constituency: counties and boroughs. County members were supposed to represent landholders, while borough members were supposed to represent mercantile and trading interests.
Counties were historical national subdivisions established between the 8th and 16th centuries. They were not merely parliamentary constituencies: many components of government (as well as courts and the militia) were organised along county lines.
Parliamentary boroughs in England ranged in size from small hamlets to large cities, partly because they had evolved haphazardly. The earliest boroughs were chosen in the Middle Ages by county sheriffs, and even a village might be deemed a borough. Many of these early boroughs (such as Winchelsea and Dunwich) were substantial settlements at the time of their original enfranchisement, but later went into decline, and by the early 19th century some only had a few electors, but still elected two MPs; they were often known as rotten boroughs. Of the 70 English boroughs that Tudor monarchs enfranchised, 31 were later disfranchised.
Statutes passed in 1430 and 1432, during the reign of Henry VI, standardised property qualifications for county voters. Under these Acts, all owners of freehold property or land with an annual value of at least forty shillings in a particular county were entitled to vote in that county. This requirement, known as the forty shilling freehold, was never adjusted for inflation of land value; thus the amount of land one had to own in order to vote gradually diminished over time. The franchise was restricted to men by custom rather than statute; on rare occasions women had been able to vote in parliamentary elections as a result of property ownership. Nevertheless, the vast majority of people were not entitled to vote; the size of the English county electorate in 1831 has been estimated at only 200,000 and 400,000 enfranchised Englishmen overall. Furthermore, the sizes of the individual county constituencies varied significantly. The smallest counties, Rutland and Anglesey, had fewer than 1,000 voters each, while the largest county, Yorkshire, had more than 20,000. Those who owned property in multiple constituencies could vote multiple times. Not only was this typically legal (since there was usually no need for a property owner to live in a constituency in order to vote there) it was also feasible, even with the technology of the time, since polling was usually held over several days.
In boroughs the franchise was far more varied. There were broadly six types of parliamentary boroughs, as defined by their franchise:
Boroughs in which freemen were electors;
Boroughs in which the franchise was restricted to those paying scot and lot, a form of municipal taxation;
Boroughs in which only the ownership of a burgage property qualified a person to vote;
Boroughs in which only members of the corporation were electors (such boroughs were perhaps in every case "pocket boroughs", because corporation members were usually "in the pocket" of a wealthy patron);
Boroughs in which male householders were electors (these were usually known as "potwalloper boroughs", as the usual definition of a householder was a person able to boil a pot on his/her own hearth);
Boroughs in which freeholders of land had the right to vote.
Some boroughs had a combination of these varying types of franchise, and most had special rules and exceptions, so many boroughs had a form of franchise that was unique to themselves.