How big is the Labour government’s majority?

What is the government’s current simple majority?

There are 650 seats in parliament. To have an overall majority, a political party must win over half of these seats: at least 326.

At the 2024 general election, the Labour Party won 411 seats. As of 24 July 2024, this stands at 404 seats following:

• the suspension of seven Labour MPs for voting in favour of an SNP amendment, tabled during the debate on the King’s Speech, which called for the government to abolish the two-child benefit limit.

The combined total of seats held by opposition parties, independent MPs and the Speaker is therefore 246. This gives the Labour Party a simple majority of 158 seats.

How do we calculate the government's working majority?  

In practice, the government has a larger ‘working majority’. This differs from the simple majority because two groups of MPs do not vote in parliament.

Firstly, there is the Speaker and his or her deputies. While the Speaker is usually first elected to Parliament as a representative of a political party, they resign from their party upon election to the chair. This is because their role requires them to be non-partisan and impartial. The Speaker does not vote upon legislation in the House of Commons unless their vote is required to break a tied division.

The Deputy Speakers – of whom there are usually three – are also expected to exercise their role impartially and without regard to party politics. They do not vote in divisions either, but unlike the Speaker, they retain their party affiliations.

By convention, of the Speaker and Deputy Speakers, two are drawn from the governing party, and two from the main opposition party. This reduces the effective size of the Commons by four, to 646 MPs. The current Speaker is Sir Lindsay Hoyle; he and Judith Cummins, one of the Deputy Speakers, were both originally elected as Labour MPs. The two other Deputy Speakers – Nusrat Ghani and Caroline Nokes – are Conservative MPs.

The second group of non-voting MPs in the House of Commons are the Sinn Féin members. Sinn Féin, a Northern Irish republican political party, rejects British political institutions and its MPs do not take up their seats in the House of Commons. The seven seats won by Sinn Féin in the 2024 general election bring the total number of voting MPs down to 639, meaning the government only needs 320 MPs to have a secure majority in parliament.

What is the government's current working majority?

With 403 Labour MPs and 236 opposition MPs eligible to vote on parliamentary legislation, the government has an effective working majority of 167 votes in the House of Commons. A very large number of Labour MPs (84) would need to rebel to ensure a government defeat in the House of Commons (provided all opposition and independent MPs vote against the government).

How does the government’s working majority usually change over the course of a parliament?

The government’s working majority often declines during the course of each parliament, as MPs lose the whip or resign their seats. This is not true of every parliament, however: the 1997 and 2015 parliaments ended with virtually identical government majorities to those with which they had started.

The 2019 parliament saw a particularly steep fall in the government’s working majority, declining 41 votes between December 2019 and the dissolution of parliament in May 2024. This was a sharper fall than any parliament except the 2017 parliament, which saw 21 Conservative MPs lose the whip for opposing a no deal Brexit. The 1992 parliament also saw a significant fall in the government’s working majority, although at slower rate than both the 2017 and 2019 parliaments.

The suspension of seven Labour MPs at the end of the debate on the King’s Speech means that the current parliament has seen the earliest fall in the working majority of any government in any parliament since at least 1979.

How big a majority did the government win at the 2024 general election?

Keir Starmer’s government won a simple majority of 172 votes at the 2024 general election, just five votes fewer than Tony Blair commanded after his 1997 landslide. However, the increase in the number of non-voting Sinn Féin MPs (which has seven MPs, compared with two in 1997) means that the government actually entered office with as large a working majority as in 1997: 181 votes.

Keir Starmer’s majority after the 2024 election was far larger than that of the previous Conservative government, which had a working majority of 46 votes by dissolution, down from 87 votes at the start of the parliament.