Calling a general election

A general election has been called for 4 July 2024. See this explainer for more detail on the timings of the 2024 general election campaign.  

How is an election called?

The ability to request a dissolution of parliament and call a general election lies with the prime minister. This means that a prime minister can effectively announce an election at a time of their choosing. If the prime minister does not call an election earlier, then parliament would be automatically dissolved “the beginning of the day that is the fifth anniversary of the day on which it first met”,  with the election being held 25 working days after that date. This means the latest date for the next general election was 28 January 2025.  

Between 2011 and 2022 prime ministers would have had to pass a vote in the House of Commons to call an early election under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act (FTPA) 2011. This has now been repealed and the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act (DaCoP) 2022 which has returned the ability to call elections to Royal Prerogative. This is how elections were called before 2011. 

Can the King call an election?  

The royal prerogative means that although the power legally lies with the King, the King exercises that power on the advice of his ministers, primarily the prime minister. 

Can the King refuse an election?  

A prime minister ‘requests’ a dissolution. The circumstances in which that request might be refused are, however, ambiguous. The government has published ‘dissolution principles’ during the process of enacting the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act. This builds on advice from the 1950s, known as the Lascelles Principles, which set out how a monarch might refuse a request if a parliament remained “vital, viable, and capable of doing its job”, if an election would be detrimental to the national economy or if the monarch can find another prime minister who could “govern for a reasonable period with a working majority in the House of Commons”. No prime minister in modern times, as far as is known, has been refused a dissolution and the principles for refusing one have therefore not been tested.

Does the Cabinet need to approve the request for a dissolution?

No. The right to request a dissolution lies with the prime minister. 

What are the problems with returning to the old way of calling elections? 

In repealing FTPA, the government has effectively restored a royal prerogative. This has not been done before because normally the direction is always in turning historic crown powers into statute. While there has been debate as to whether it was possible to ‘revive’ a prerogative, the government has done so by legislating to make a previous power under the prerogative ‘exercisable again’.  

The major concern is that the government has taken away from the Commons the right to decide when parliament should be dissolved and instead given the prime minister unconstrained power over elections. The criticism of this is that a parliamentary role protects against an abusive dissolution, for instance, an attempt by a prime minister to dissolve parliament again following an election in which he or she did not get an overall majority. There is also an argument that a system in which parliament calls elections is more democratic, not least because it is parliament that is being dissolved. Research has found that, on average, a prime minister gets a vote share bonus of 6% and a seat share bonus of 12% when they pick the election date, increasing the chances that they stay in office. ⁴ Schleiter and Belu, 'Electoral incumbency advantages and the introduction of fixed parliamentary terms in the United Kingdom', The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 2018, Vol. 20(2) 303-322  The new Act also raises concerns relating to the role of the monarch. 

The 2019 prorogation saga, when the Queen felt compelled to grant Boris Johnson a five-week prorogation of parliament (later reversed by the Supreme Court), highlighted the monarch’s difficulty in dissenting from the advice of her ministers. To do so would expose the monarch to allegations of political interference of an undemocratic nature, even if the intention of the refusal was to preserve the good functioning of democracy. This makes for an uneasy role if a future dissolution occurred controversially. 

Can the prime minister call an election if he has lost a confidence vote?

There are different kinds of confidence votes. 

If the government lost a House of Commons confidence vote it is expected that they either resign from office or call a general election.

If the prime minister faced a challenge as party leader, requesting a general election could prove controversial. For the conservative party, 15% of MPs writing to the chair of the 1922 backbench committee saying they have lost confidence in the leader would trigger a vote of confidence in the party leader. In theory, the prime minister could request a general election  before the subsequent vote by conservative MPs took place as they would not at that point have lost confidence of the House as prime minister. But doing so would bring the Sovereign into political controversy. 

If the sitting prime minister had lost that a party leadership confidence vote, it would trigger a leadership contest to elect a new party leader. In the past, outgoing conservative leaders have remained as prime minister while that leadership contest took place. For a prime minister to request a dissolution at that point would  prove highly controversial.

Can the public force a general election? 

The public, and opposition parties, can only try and put pressure on the prime minister if they believe an election should be held sooner.  

If a majority of MPs want an earlier election, they could hold a vote of no confidence in the government. If the government lost that, it would have to either resign in favour of the opposition or call an election. As the government still has a sizeable majority, both options would require a section of Conservative MPs either voting for an election or no confidence in their own government.