In the

Parliament of the United Kingdom The Parliament of the United Kingdom is the supreme legislative body of the United Kingdom, the Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories. It meets at the Palace of Westminster, London. It alone possesses legislative suprema ...

, a carry-over motion or carry-over bill is a form of

motion In physics, motion is the phenomenon in which an object changes its position with respect to time. Motion is mathematically described in terms of displacement, distance, velocity, acceleration, speed and frame of reference to an observer and mea ...

. Ordinarily a bill that does not receive

royal assent Royal assent is the method by which a monarch formally approves an act of the legislature, either directly or through an official acting on the monarch's behalf. In some jurisdictions, royal assent is equivalent to promulgation, while in other ...

by the end of the

parliamentary session A legislative session is the period of time in which a legislature, in both parliamentary and presidential systems, is convened for purpose of lawmaking, usually being one of two or more smaller divisions of the entire time between two elections. ...

fails; to become an Act, it must be re-introduced in the following session. A carry-over motion allows the bill to continue its progress at the start of the following session rather than having to start the

legislative process A bill is proposed legislation under consideration by a legislature. A bill does not become law until it is passed by the legislature as well as, in most cases, approved by the Executive (government), executive. Once a bill has been enacted into ...

again. The bill can still fail notwithstanding a carry-over if an early election is called. Some restrictions apply: #Only government bills can be carried over; backbench and opposition bills cannot be subjected to such a motion. #Bills introduced in the House of Lords cannot be carried over. (Additionally, the Lords has no procedure of its own for carrying bills over.) #Bills can only be carried over once; a bill that was carried over from a previous session cannot be carried over again. #A slightly different procedure applies to "bills brought in upon a ways and means resolution", i.e.

money bill In the Westminster system (and, colloquially, in the United States), a money bill or supply bill is a bill that solely concerns taxation or government spending (also known as appropriation of money), as opposed to changes in public law. Conv ...

References

Parliament of the United Kingdom {{UK-poli-stub