What happens to a bill when a session ends
When a parliamentary session ends at prorogation, any bill that has not completed all its stages normally falls, and must start again from scratch if it is to proceed. The main exception is carry-over: a bill can be carried into the next session by a motion, in practice available to government bills. When Parliament is dissolved for a general election, there are no exceptions, and every bill still in progress is lost.
Sessions, and why bills die with them
Parliament works in sessions, each usually running about a year and ended by prorogation. The rule that pending bills fall at the session’s end is one of the oldest disciplines in the legislative timetable: it forces governments to prioritise, and it is why the final weeks of a session are crowded with bills racing to finish ping pong before the deadline.
Prorogation is not the same as a recess. Parliament adjourns for a recess and pending bills simply pause, resuming exactly where they left off. Only prorogation ends the session and puts bills at risk.
Carry-over
The Commons can agree a carry-over motion allowing a public bill to resume in the next session at the stage it had reached, rather than starting again. In practice carry-over is used for government bills, and it is not indefinite: under the Commons’ rules a carried-over bill normally lapses if it has not completed its passage within a year of its first reading, unless the House agrees to extend it. A bill can be saved by carry-over once, not session after session.
Dissolution and the wash-up
Dissolution, the formal end of a Parliament before a general election, is stricter than prorogation: every bill still in progress falls, with no carry-over of any kind. Legislation must begin again in the new Parliament, under whichever government the election produces.
The days between a general election being called and dissolution produce a distinctive scramble known as the wash-up, in which the government and opposition agree which almost-finished bills to rush through in a stripped-down form. Bills lose contentious clauses wholesale in these deals, so what emerges from a wash-up can differ sharply from the bill the Commons spent months examining.
What a fallen bill means in practice
A fallen bill is not necessarily a dead policy. Governments regularly reintroduce fallen bills in the next session, sometimes identically and sometimes rewritten, and a reintroduced bill starts its stages afresh, which reopens arguments its predecessor had settled. If a bill you track falls, the next session’s legislative programme, announced in the King’s Speech, is where to look for its return.
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