On 1 September, both Houses of Parliament resumed sitting following the end of the summer recess. Their present term is short; it spans only until around 17 September due to party conference season. Yet it remains significant as it is the first time that the new Burnham government has been subject to parliamentary scrutiny. While all eyes have been on the new Prime Minister’s commitments to “re-wire the state” and introduce a new political and economic model, less attention has been given to the significant question of what bills are before Parliament at this critical time. Below, I provide an overview of the key bills that are next-up on the legislative agenda.
Procedural background
Parliamentary sittings ordinarily consist of sessions, usually lasting for around a year, but sometimes less and sometimes more. The current session, 2026-2027, began on 13 May 2026, and was marked by the King’s Speech and the State Opening of Parliament. The preceding session, 2024-2026, consisted of a particularly long period of just over 21 months and ended by prorogation last April. The beginning of a new session has significant implications for the Government’s legislative agenda because of the general rule that bills which have not completed all their stages are automatically lost. There are, however, some exceptions relating to bills introduced by the government (“government bills”) and those which contain some rules for the general public, but primarily pertain to certain groups or places (“hybrid bills”). Pursuant to Standing Order 80A of the House of Commons, at the end of a parliamentary session, a minister may give notice of a “carry-over motion” on a public bill, provided that the bill is still in the House in which it was introduced. If the House agrees to such a motion, the bill is simply re-introduced in the new session at whatever stage it was left off.
What’s before Parliament now? Something old
The parliamentary database currently lists 172 bills as being before Parliament, with four additional acts as being successfully passed. The most significant are the 17 government bills, as they will likely become legislation given the Government controls the parliamentary agenda. These bills vary greatly in their technical nature and policy significance. Seven government bills and an eighth hybrid bill are technically “old” in the sense that they have been carried over from the last parliamentary session, namely: the Armed Forces Bill; the Courts and Tribunals Bill; the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill; the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill; the Representation of the People Bill; the Railways Bill; the Public Office (Accountability) Bill; and the High-Speed Rail Bill. Some have proved to be relatively innocuous. The Armed Forces Bill primarily seeks to continue to provide legal effect for the Armed Forces Act 2006, which would otherwise be sunsetted at the end of the calendar year. But this Bill also makes some important new changes; amongst other matters, it: enshrines the armed forces covenant into law, establishes a new ‘Defence Housing Service’, raises the maximum volunteer recall age from 55 to 65 and makes provisions relating to the detention of drones near military sites.
In principle the Public Office (Accountability) Bill has similarly enjoyed support from across the House. Commonly known as the “Hillsborough law” – due to its associations with the 1989 disaster where 97 Liverpool fans died, and authorities tried to deflect blame – this Bill imposes on public authorities and officials a duty of candour when engaging with inquiries, inquests and public investigations. But as Kate Dewsnip has explained, its passage has not been straightforward because campaigners and members of the public felt the Starmer government had failed to go far enough, giving the Security Services to a legal exemption from the duty of candour, though this has since been removed from the Bill.
Nevertheless, some bills that have been carried over remain highly contentious, like the Courts and Tribunals Bill, as well as the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill. The former aims to tackle the backlog of around 80,000 criminal cases by introducing the most significant changes to the justice system in over fifty years. It removes defendants’ rights to elect for trial in the Crown Court for either-way offences, replaces the automatic right to appeal to the Crown Court with a permission stage, expands magistrates’ sentencing powers, and removes the right to trial by jury in the case of either-way offences likely to receive a custodial sentence of up to three years, in addition to complex fraud and financial cases. The limitations on the right to trial by jury were opposed by many members of the legal profession, all the opposition parties, and a number of Labour backbenchers.
The NI Troubles Bill is immensely controversial because it attempts to rewrite how the UK handles historic crimes from the 30-year conflict. The Conservative government’s Legacy Act 2023 had offered conditional immunity to individuals accused of Troubles-related killings in exchange for their co-operation in a truth recovery body. However, in February 2024, the Northern Ireland High Court had held that key provisions within the Legacy Act were incompatible with key ECHR rights. Acknowledging that the Legacy Act had ‘caused immense pain to victims’ and been found unlawful, the Starmer administration introduced the NI Troubles Bill to fix ‘the flawed and failed legislation … in a way that honours victims.’ It repeals parts of the Legacy Act in order to remove the possibility of gaining immunity from prosecution, allow civil actions to be brought relating to the Troubles, introduces a new Legacy Commission which will have independent oversight powers and be able to conduct criminal investigations. The Bill is highly unpopular amongst veterans as they believe that it exposes elderly former soldiers to the possibility of an endless number of investigations decades on from their service. Conversely, it is regarded by victims’ families and and many in Northern Ireland as instituting an unfair process which protects veterans at the expense of truth and justice for bereaved families.
Something borrowed
Another bill that was not entirely new was the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, a private member’s bill which sought to legalise assisted dying. An identical bill had been scrutinised by MPs in the previous parliamentary session, but that Bill ran out of time in the House of Lords and could not pass by May 2026, due to an unprecedented number of amendments. Although the same text was re-introduced as a new Bill by Lauren Edwards MP in June 2026, last Friday, on 11 September, MPs voted against the proposed legislation. In an excellent podcast, members of the Hansard Society provide several possible explanations for why the Bill was rejected, despite identical measures being supported by MPs in the previous session.
Something new
Thirteen new government bills have been introduced since the beginning of the current parliamentary session in May. Most are relatively uncontroversial, including the Civil Aviation Bill and the National Security State Threats Act. The most controversial bills – and perhaps the most contested along party lines – are the Social Housing Bill and the the Immigration and Asylum Bill. The former is meant to “protect much-needed social housing stock” in various ways, including by extending the qualifying period for a social tenant to exercise the Right to Buy from three to 10 years. The latter radically reforms the immigration appeals system by replacing the First-tier Tribunal with a new Immigration and Appeals Authority which would decide on many first instance cases, including immigration bail applications, challenges to deprivations of citizenship and appeals on human rights grounds. Although this policy is meant to solve the widely-acknowledged backlog in asylum applications, members of the new appellate body need not have a legal background, which many lawyers have objected to on the basis that this is likely to lead to a high risk of erroneous and unfair decisions. Moreover, as Professor Joanna Bell has explained, the real difficulty is whether laypersons within this newly qualified body could be recruited and trained to a rigorous enough standard that they are able to undertake all the necessary casework by 2027.
And the long-term view
We have yet to see any new bill implementing the Burnham government’s commitments on the machinery of government, devolution, codification, adult social care reform and homelessness. The key question at present remains how the Burnham government intends to implement and fund its new agenda. A few questions worth asking include how different the forthcoming legislative agenda will be from the Labour manifesto commitments of 2023, and whether the new administration can meet its most radical policy commitments including those to abolish homelessness and shift power outside of Whitehall to every postcode in the country.
Tasneem Ghazi.
Tasneem is a PhD student at the UCL Faculty of Laws. Tasneem previously completed the Barrister Training Course while working part-time as a research assistant at the Constitution Unit. In 2021, she interned at the Institute for Government and at the UK in a Changing Europe. Tasneem holds an MA in History from King’s College London, and an LLB in Politics, Philosophy and Law.
The Constitution Society is committed to the promotion of informed debate and is politically impartial. Any views expressed in this article are the personal views of the author and not those of The Constitution Society.