When will the next UK general election be?

21st October 2023

Ben Paxton from The Institute for Government explains the process for calling the next General Election

The prime minister can call the next general election any time between now and 17 December 2024.

The 17 December 2024 is exactly five years since parliament first met after the last general election, in 2019. If an election has not been called by this point, parliament would be automatically dissolved and the election would take place 25 working days later. This means the latest date for the next general election is 28 January 2025.

To call an election before 17 December 2024, the prime minister must ask the monarch to dissolve parliament. In recent decades this has usually been done in a visit to Buckingham Palace, with the prime minister announcing the general election from the steps of Downing Street shortly after. Parliament is then typically dissolved a few days after the announcement to allow unfinished parliamentary business to be completed, known as ‘wash-up'. The ‘pre-election period' (previously known as ‘purdah') normally begins once the election is called, or shortly after,1 and places restrictions on government activity during the campaign.

The prime minister no longer needs parliament to vote for a general election, which was required between 2011 and 2022, after the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 was repealed and replaced by the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2022.

How will the prime minister decide when to call an election?
Prime ministers have called elections for various reasons in the past: to secure a mandate on a specific issue, to strengthen their authority in parliament, or because the five-year term has ended. In the past 40 years, governments have only tended to call an election before the end of the five-year term when confident of success. The party in power has won a majority on five of these six occasions (the exception being 2017).

The key factor most likely to determine when Rishi Sunak calls the next election is when he has the maximum chance of success. There are two overarching calculations he will make in judging this:

The strength of his political position
The Conservatives are trailing Labour in the polls, and the prime minister will want to narrow that gap before calling an election. In aiming to do so, he will consider:

The economy: When the economy is doing badly, or has recently suffered a shock, incumbent governments tend to do worse in elections.2 Sunak made the economy a focus of three of his five pledges. Forecasts suggest the longer he waits, the stronger the economy is likely to be.

Read the full article HERE

If you want more then there is an interesting podcast HERE
Will it be May? Maybe October? Perhaps November? Surely not January 2025? Yes, everyone is talking about when the next general election is going to be held - and speculating when Rishi Sunak will decide to go to the country.

So is it right for the prime minister to have the power to choose the date of a general election? What are the key considerations to make when looking at the polls – or the weather forecast? And what does history tell us about when is the right time to call an election – and when is the wrong time to stick rather than twist?

This special episode of Inside Briefing brings together three veterans of elections that were – or maybe weren't – to look back on their experiences and discuss what might happen next.

Former Labour MP Jacqui Smith was home secretary when Gordon Brown chose not to call a general election in the autumn of 2007.
Katie Perrior was working as the Number 10’s director of communications when Theresa May decided to call a snap election in 2017.
Political adviser and pollster James Johnson worked in Number 10 as a strategic adviser to Theresa May between 2016 and 2019.