Representation of the People Act 1918

As a result of the act, the male electorate was extended by 5.2 million to 12.9 million. The female electorate was 8.5 million. The act also created new electoral arrangements, including making residence in a specific constituency the basis of the right to vote and institutionalising the first-past-the-post method of election.

It was not until the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928 (18 & 19 Geo. 5. c. 12) that women gained electoral equality. The 1928 act gave the vote to all women aged over 21, regardless of any property qualification, which added another five million women to the electorate.

Background

After the Third Reform Act in 1884, 60% of male householders over the age of 21 had the vote. This left 40% who did not – including the poorest in society. Thus millions of soldiers returning from World War I would still not have been entitled to vote in the long overdue general election. (The last election had been in December 1910.)

The issue of a female right to vote first gathered momentum during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In 1865, the Kensington Society, a discussion group for middle-class women who were barred from higher education, met at the home of India scholar Charlotte Manning in Kensington. Following a discussion on suffrage, a small informal committee was formed to draft a petition and gather signatures, led by women including Barbara Bodichon, Emily Davies, and Elizabeth Garrett. In 1869, John Stuart Mill published The Subjection of Women in which he attempted to make a case for perfect equality. He described the role of women in marriage and how it needed to be changed, and comments on three major facets of women's lives that he felt were hindering them: society and gender construction, education, and marriage. He argued that the oppression of women was one of the few remaining relics from ancient times, a set of prejudices that severely impeded the progress of humanity. He agreed to present a petition to Parliament, provided it had at least 100 signatures, and the first version was drafted by his step-daughter, Helen Taylor.

The suffragist Millicent Fawcett suggested that the women's right to vote issue was the main reason for the Speaker's Conference in 1917. She was frustrated by the resultant age limit, though recognising that there were one and a half million more women than men in the country at the time (due to the loss of life in the First World War), accepted that this would not have wide, cross-party support; many of those in favour of suffrage at the Speaker's Conference still wanted to maintain a male majority. Recalling Disraeli's quip, she noted that Britain "is governed not by logic, but by Parliament".

The Home Secretary, George Cave (Con) within the governing coalition introduced the bill:

War by all classes of our countrymen has brought us nearer together, has opened men’s eyes, and removed misunderstandings on all sides. It has made it, I think, impossible that ever again, at all events in the lifetime of the present generation, there should be a revival of the old class feeling which was responsible for so much, and, among other things, for the exclusion for a period, of so many of our population from the class of electors. I think I need say no more to justify this extension of the franchise.

As well, another electoral reform had been debated and only partially implemented – the elimination of plural voting. Between 1906 and 1914, the Liberal Party had been intent on passing a bill to prevent electors whose names appeared on the electoral register more than once from voting more than once. However, Parliament shelved the bill when the First World War started.

Section 8(1) of the Representation of the People Act 1918 partially reduced plural voting, providing that "a man shall not vote at a general election ... for more than one constituency for which he is registered by virtue of other qualifications [than a residence qualification] of whatever kind, and a woman shall not vote at a general election ... for more than one constituency for which she is registered by virtue of any other qualification [than a local government qualification]". As a result, no one was allowed to vote more than twice in a general election of the House of Commons.

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Passage of bill through Parliament

The bill was introduced in May 1917 with various stages taking place during the rest of the year, then into 1918. The number of attending members in both Houses was much lower than would be expected due to active military service.

The Speakers' Conference of 1917 had recommended a form of proportional representation to be enacted, but this proved a highly contentious topic through differences of the methods between the two Houses. The final votes of the Bill took place on the very last day of the parliamentary session with the Act including a section arranging for a royal commission to consider whether "one hundred members shall be elected to the House of Commons at a general election on the principle of proportional representation for constituencies in Great Britain returning three or more members". The subsequent commission was held two months after the act was passed and was rejected by the House of Commons.

The very final vote on 6 February 1918 in the House of Commons that led to royal assent of the bill was passed with 224 Ayes to 114 Noes.

Terms of the act

The Representation of the People Act 1918 widened suffrage by abolishing practically all property qualifications for men and by enfranchising women over 30 who met minimum property qualifications. The enfranchisement of this latter group was accepted as recognition of the contribution made by women defence workers. However, women were still not politically equal to men (who could vote from the age of 21); full electoral equality was achieved in Ireland in 1922, but did not occur in Britain until the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928 (18 & 19 Geo. 5. c. 12).

The terms of the act were:

All men over 21 gained the vote in the constituency where they were resident. Men who had turned 19 during service in connection with World War I could also vote even if they were under 21, although there was some confusion over whether they could do so after being discharged from service. The Representation of the People Act 1920 clarified this in the affirmative, albeit after the 1918 general election.
Women over 30 years old received the vote if they were registered property occupiers (or married to a registered property occupier) of land or premises with a rateable value greater than £5 or of a dwelling-house and not subject to any legal incapacity, or were graduates voting in a university constituency.
Some seats were redistributed to industrial towns. Seats in Ireland were amended separately, by the Redistribution of Seats (Ireland) Act 1918.
All polls for an election to be held on a specified date, rather than over several days in different constituencies as previously.

The act added 8.4 million women to the electorate as well as 5.6 million men. It was therefore the largest of all the UK Reform Acts in terms of electorate addition.

The costs incurred by returning officers were for the first time to be paid by the Treasury. Prior to the 1918 general election, the administrative costs were passed on to the candidates to pay in addition to their expenses.

Short title, commencement and extent

Section 47(2) of the act provided that the act may be cited as the "Representation of the People Act, 1918".

Section 46(1) of the act provided that the act would come into force on the passing of the act.

Repealed enactments

Section 47(1) of the act repealed 109 enactments, listed in the eighth schedule to the act.

Political changes

The size of the electorate tripled from the 7.7 million who had been entitled to vote in 1912 to 21.4 million by the end of 1918. Women now accounted for about 39.64% of the electorate. Had women been enfranchised based upon the same requirements as men, they would have been in the majority because of the loss of men in the war.

The age of 30 was chosen because it was all that was politically possible at the time. Any attempt to make it lower would have failed. as Lord Robert Cecil explained shortly after the act was passed:

That is the reason why the age limit of thirty was introduced, in order to avoid extending the franchise to a very large number of women, for fear they might be in a majority in the electorate of this country. It was for that reason only, and it had nothing to do with their qualifications at all. No one would seriously suggest that a woman of twenty-five is less capable of giving a vote than a woman of thirty-five.

In addition to the suffrage changes, the act also instituted the present system of holding all voting in a general election on one day, as opposed to being staggered over a period of weeks (although the polling itself would only take place on a single day in each constituency), and brought in the annual electoral register.

Aftermath

The first election held under the new system was the 1918 general election. Polling took place on 14 December 1918, but vote-counting did not start until 29 December 1918.

After this act gave about 8.4 million women the vote, the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act 1918 was passed in November 1918, allowing women to be elected to Parliament. Several women stood for election to the House of Commons in 1918, but only one, the Sinn Féin candidate for Dublin St. Patrick's, Constance Markievicz, was elected; however she followed her party's abstentionist policy and did not take her seat at Westminster and instead sat in the Dáil Éireann (the First Dáil) in Dublin. The first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons was Nancy Astor on 1 December 1919, who was elected as a Coalition Conservative MP for Plymouth Sutton on 28 November 1919.

As Members of Parliament, women also gained the right to become government ministers. The first woman cabinet minister and Privy Council member was the Labour Party's Margaret Bondfield, Minister of Labour from 1929 to 1931.

Although the act extended the franchise significantly, it did not create a complete system of one person, one vote. Seven percent of the population enjoyed a plural vote in the 1918 election, mostly well off or middle-class men who had an extra vote due to a university constituency (this act increased the university vote by creating the Combined English Universities seats) or by occupying business premises in a constituency different from where they live.