Keir Starmer expected to limit MPs’ summer break if Labour wins UK election

Sir Keir Starmer is expected to cut short MPs’ summer holidays if he wins the July 4 general election, as a senior Conservative cabinet minister said Labour could be heading for a “supermajority”.

Senior Labour figures said the party wanted to make progress on its legislation quickly if it wins power, with Starmer’s allies looking at delaying the House of Commons recess until the end of July or early August.

“We are hungry and can’t wait until September to start,” said one senior Labour official, while stressing that no final decisions had been taken. A spokesperson for Starmer declined to comment.

The Commons recess was originally scheduled to start on July 23. But Labour figures said MPs could be asked to work in the week from July 29 to August 2. An earlier return after the summer holidays was also possible.

Although Starmer has insisted he does not take the result of the election for granted, defence secretary Grant Shapps on Wednesday said the Tories were trying to stop the Labour leader winning by a landslide.

“You want to make sure that in this next government, whoever forms it, there’s a proper system of accountability,” Shapps told Times Radio.

“You don’t want to have somebody receive a supermajority,” he added, warning “it would be very bad news for people in this country” if Starmer’s power was “unchecked”.

Shapps said the country did not function well when it was run by a large majority governments, citing Sir Tony Blair’s 179-seat Labour majority after the 1997 general election.

Shapps said: “We would say there are a lot of very good, hardworking MPs who can hold the government of the day to account. And we’d say those are Conservative MPs.”

His comments confirm a pivot in Tory strategy, first reported by the Financial Times, where Facebook and Instagram ads placed by the party started stressing the risk of a big Labour majority.

The tactic partly reflects electoral reality — Labour leads the Tories by 20 points in polling — and is partly an effort to stop soft Tory voters switching to Reform UK, thus increasing the likelihood of a Starmer landslide.

Asked on Wednesday if he was conceding defeat, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said: “No absolutely not. What you saw yesterday is we’ve put a manifesto forward which has got a very clear set of tax cuts for the country, tax cuts at every stage of your life.”

If Labour wins the election on July 4 it will be in a position to present its first legislative programme since Gordon Brown drafted the Queen’s Speech for Queen Elizabeth in November 2009.

This time King Charles would read out the new government’s programme on July 17, beginning an expected six days of debate in the Commons on its contents.

To provide time for that debate and to allow a Labour government to potentially introduce some legislation, party officials said they expected the Commons to sit into the week ending on Friday, August 2.

Labour’s legislative priorities include the creation of GB Energy, a new state-owned energy company, and strengthened worker rights. The party could also revive legislation, proposed by Sunak, to progressively ban smoking.

Labour supported the smoking bill, which ran out of parliamentary time after Sunak called a snap election last month.

Cancelling the entire August holiday season would be complicated for a number of reasons, not least because parliamentary staff working at Westminster would have planned their breaks.

MPs, likely to be exhausted after six weeks of election campaigning, would also want a holiday.

The Commons will return for a short session before the party conference season starts on September 14 with the Liberal Democrats in Brighton. It ends on October 2, with the conclusion of the Tory conference in Birmingham.

Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has said she would observe the normal 10-week notice period to the Office for Budget Responsibility to begin preparing forecasts for a Budget.

That would imply a Labour Budget would not be held before mid-September.