The Representation of the People Act 1949 was an Act of the

Parliament of the United Kingdom The Parliament of the United Kingdom is the supreme legislative body of the United Kingdom, the Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories. It meets at the Palace of Westminster, London. It alone possesses legislative suprema ...

. The Act consolidated previous electoral law, but also made some changes to administration. Representation of the People amendments followed in

1969 This year is notable for Apollo 11's first landing on the moon. Events January * January 4 – The Government of Spain hands over Ifni to Morocco. * January 5 **Ariana Afghan Airlines Flight 701 crashes into a house on its approach to ...

, 1977, 1978, and 1980, all being repealed through consolidation into the

Representation of the People Act 1983 The Representation of the People Act 1983 (c. 2) is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It changed the British electoral process in the following ways: * Amended the Representation of the People Act 1969. * Stated that a convicted pe ...

. The principal change was to provide for the conduct of future reviews of Parliamentary boundaries by the permanent Parliamentary Boundary Commissions. The Act also abolished the terms 'Parliamentary Borough' and 'Parliamentary County', renaming them 'Borough constituency' and 'County constituency', abolished the

university constituencies A university constituency is a constituency, used in elections to a legislature, that represents the members of one or more universities rather than residents of a geographical area. These may or may not involve plural voting, in which voters ar ...

, and removed a requirement that the

City of London The City of London is a city, ceremonial county and local government district that contains the historic centre and constitutes, alongside Canary Wharf, the primary central business district (CBD) of London. It constituted most of London fr ...

form its own constituency. The Boundary Commissions were instructed to review all boundaries within 3–7 years from the Act coming into force, and thereafter to review the boundaries periodically. In addition the Act made some changes to the franchise, removing the remaining provisions allowing

plural voting Plural voting is the practice whereby one person might be able to vote multiple times in an election. It is not to be confused with a plurality voting system which does not necessarily involve plural voting. Weighted voting is a generalisation of p ...

in parliamentary elections by people who owned business premises. (However, plural voting for local government elections continued until it was abolished, outside the

, by the

Representation of the People Act 1969 The Representation of the People Act 1969 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. This statute is sometimes known as the Sixth Reform Act. The Act lowered the voting age to 18. The United Kingdom was the first major democratic country ...

. It still exists in the City of London - see

City of London Corporation elections The City of London Corporation elections occur regularly to provide the elected representatives who run the City of London Corporation. There are 25 wards in the City of London which are represented on the Court of Common Council by an Alderman an ...

). From this point forward, there was a single

electoral register An electoral roll (variously called an electoral register, voters roll, poll book or other description) is a compilation that lists persons who are entitled to vote for particular elections in a particular jurisdiction. The list is usually broke ...

for both local government and Parliamentary elections and each voter was only allowed to vote once in any general election even if they happened to be registered in more than one address for local elections.

References

* D. J. Rossiter, Ronald John Johnston, C. J. Pattie, "The Boundary Commissions: redrawing the UK's map of parliamentary constituencies", Manchester University Press, 1999, p. 87–90. {{UK legislation Representation of the People Acts United Kingdom Acts of Parliament 1949 November 1949 events in the United Kingdom

See also

References