When will the next UK general election take place?

Budget could be the 'starting gun' for a snap May election, say some Westminster insiders

Rishi Sunak
Speculation continues to grow concerning a May general election
(Image credit: Jacob King - Pool/Getty Images)

Keir Starmer urged Rishi Sunak to "confirm 2 May as the date of the next general election" in his response to last week's Budget.

While the prevailing view in Westminster is that Sunak will take the country to the polls in the autumn, a senior Labour strategist told the Financial Times that the prime minister is "definitely" preparing for a May election. 

"Whether Sunak ends up doing it remains to be seen. But we are ready whenever it happens," the unnamed Labour staffer told the paper. 

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Preparations are already under way for a possible snap election to coincide with the local elections on 2 May. For a general election to take place on that date, Sunak would have to call for the dissolution of Parliament by 26 March. "We've been told to cancel all leave until that date," one Liberal Democrat campaign official told the FT. 

But with a YouGov poll released last week giving Labour a 26-point lead, "many Tory MPs believe Sunak would be crazy to call an election in such a weak position". 

What has Rishi Sunak said about a general election?

Speculation has been rife for months about exactly when the prime minister will call the election. 

In January, during a visit to a youth centre in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, Sunak said his "working assumption" was that there would be a general election "in the second half of this year".

How is the next general election date chosen?

According to the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act, the current Parliament will be automatically dissolved on 17 December 2024, five years after it first met, unless an election is called earlier by the prime minister. The latest the next general election could be held would be 28 January 2025.

From 2011, the House of Commons had control over when an election would take place, but this was changed after the 2019 election, restoring the power of the prime minister to call elections at a time of their choosing.

When will he call one? 

Given the need to tidy up legislative loose ends beforehand, an election on 2 May would mean Sunak "would have to fire the starting gun in ten days' time", polling expert John Curtice said in The Telegraph on 6 March.

That is "too short a period during which to come [up with] any realistic assessment of whether the Budget has indeed dramatically and permanently changed the political weather" and so "looks potentially suicidal". 

Downing Street insiders, however, had said the prime minister was more likely to call a general election in the autumn, in the hope that "lower inflation, tax cuts and – hopefully – lower interest rates" can give his party a fighting chance as it trails behind Labour in the polls, said the Financial Times.

Sunak has been in office for over a year; "the government may seem to everyone else to already be in extra time, but it won’t feel that way in Downing Street", said Henry Hill in The Guardian. An autumn election would give Sunak "two years on the job", the first of which he arguably spent "steadying the ship after Liz Truss".

An October or November election therefore remains "the most reasonable baseline scenario", said Hill. An election then would be "late enough to make use of the time remaining in this parliament, but not so late as to ruin Christmas and drag voters to the polls in January".

Prime ministers generally avoid campaigning over the summer recess, "and the government has been advised by the security services for it not to clash with the US presidential election on 5 November", said The New Statesman's associate political editor Rachel Cuncliffe. 

So far, Sunak has yet to explicitly rule out a May election, and has previously made comments that he wanted to "keep going" and had "lots to get on with".

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 Sorcha Bradley is a writer at The Week and a regular on “The Week Unwrapped” podcast. She worked at The Week magazine for a year and a half before taking up her current role with the digital team, where she mostly covers UK current affairs and politics. Before joining The Week, Sorcha worked at slow-news start-up Tortoise Media. She has also written for Sky News, The Sunday Times, the London Evening Standard and Grazia magazine, among other publications. She has a master’s in newspaper journalism from City, University of London, where she specialised in political journalism.