Tens of thousands of people will gather for the annual Boxing Day hunt on Monday, with the ban on hunting and the row over its repeal set to be thrust back into the political spotlight in the new year.

Hunting bosses have urged supporters to turn out to hunts across the West on Boxing Day – the day when packs of hounds and horses traditionally meet in market town centres for one of the main “showpiece” days of the hunting calendar.

The hunts will gather on Monday to renew their calls for repeal of the 2005 Hunting Act, and say they hope a free vote will be held on the issue in Parliament between now and the 2015 General Election. Outgoing Countryside Alliance chief executive Alice Barnard issued a rallying cry to hunt supporters to turn up to the meets, and call unanimously for repeal.

“Never shy away from standing up for hunting and berating the disgraceful reasons the discredited and shattered Hunting Act ever made the Statute Book,” she said.

Defra minister Jim Paice is expected to use the Boxing Day meets to repeat the Government’s assertion that a free vote would be held on the Hunting Act “when parliamentary time allows”, although no date has been fixed for the issue to be debated by MPs.

Without an overall majority, and with private polling among MPs appearing to come out in support of maintaining the ban – or at least not revisiting it in the Commons – the Coalition Government has shied away from the issue, with David Cameron distancing himself from previous support for hunting.

Louise Robertson, from the League Against Cruel Sports, said: “It is blatantly obvious that the Coalition Government has kicked this issue into the long grass and any talk of repeal being imminent is nothing more than bluster.

“This is just a desperate attempt by the hunting lobby to put a positive spin on their dwindling sport to appease their supporters on Boxing Day. The truth is we are further from repeal than we’ve ever been,” she added.

Hunts will gather on Boxing Day in Lacock in Wiltshire and Didmarton, Thornbury, Andoversford and Longhope in Gloucestershire. There are meets in the centre of Chepstow and in Somerset at Castle Cary, Priddy, Crewkerne, Chard and Ilminster. In Herefordshire, the hunts are meeting in the centre of Kington, Hereford and Bromyard, and in Dorset there are meets at Beaminster and Dorchester.

Somerset anti-hunt monitor Graham Forsyth said some hunts have not informed anyone of their meets, and pledged that demonstrations will take place by anti-hunt protestors.