Reform Act 1867

The Representation of the People Act 1867, commonly called the Reform Act 1867 or the Second Reform Act, is a United Kingdom statute that extended the parliamentary franchise to a significant portion of the urban male working class in England and Wales for the first time. It lowered the property qualification for voting in borough constituencies to include most male householders and lodgers paying a minimum rent, roughly doubling the size of the English and Welsh electorate. The bill was introduced and steered through Parliament by Chancellor of the Exchequer Benjamin Disraeli on behalf of a minority Conservative government, in a political maneuver that outflanked the opposition Liberals, who had failed to pass a more modest reform bill the previous year. It did not extend the vote to women, agricultural laborers or the rural working class more broadly, gaps that were addressed by subsequent reform acts in 1884 and 1918.