Yes you can plant now, if you go to your local garden centre you will have a great choice of roses, possibly try a David Austin rose, give it a good start by digging a decent hole and incorporate some good decent muck and compost, avoid planting the rose if it’s where another rose once resided.

Probably just that online sellers send out bare-root plants which are best planted early Autumn or late Winter.
A nice healthy one in a pot can go in anytime. One little tip- even from the most reputable garden centre, take the plant out of the pot &, on a plastic sheet, roll the soil ball so it breaks up & you can really see if the roots need unknotting & teasing out

If you buy one in a pot you can then give them it in May and they will be able to plant it out then. you will also be able to see how healthy the growth is.
a nice gesture.

Garden Centers here are bursting with all sorts of roses, bare root and packed in compost. That means now is the best time to plant - they are just breaking bud. May is rather late though. I'd get it for them now with a package of rose fertilizer. It should be planted and settled in now so maybe it will bloom in May.

Thanks all.

Thanks in particular to Bathgate. They are planning a family and friends celebration at home; in the garden if the weather is kind. It would be nice if it were in bloom for that.

Generally speaking in the UK, the optimum time for planting almost any plant (including roses), is actually autumn, with some exceptions. The next best time is around March - the purpose of planting at these times is so the plants get a chance to settle their roots in before trying to produce lots of top growth in response to the higher light levels and increasing warmth that comes with the growing season from April onwards, as well as suffering the rigours of intermittent dry spells with medium to high temperatures.

When it comes to bare root plants, as others suggest, these are not sent out until late autumn during dormancy, and should be planted during late autumn and winter, so long as the ground is neither frozen nor waterlogged, but not later than February.

Container or potted plants are available year round, and can be planted any time, but extra care must be taken to keep them well watered during warm dry spells, especially if planted during late spring and summer.
If you want to order a rose online, make sure you look at the potted section, not the bare root, its way too late for those this year, they will not be available, even if listed, until late autumn.

Please may I add another query on the same subject ?
Were given a Golden Wedding rose in December. It was in full leaf so I didn't plant it out then. I wanted to replace another gold rose that has had its day and was thinking about adding the microrhizal stuff to avoid rose sickness. But the other day someone on here said it makes no difference. Advice please? If it really can't replace the other how far away does it need to be planted?

I just checked the RHS site to see what their advice is now in regard to this - they now call it Replant Disease, not rose sickness. They also say that producers of mycorrhizal fungi claim it prevents this problem, but without confirming or denying this themselves. Other suggestions for trying to prevent it are in the link below...

https://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profile?pid=572

Were it me, I'd just dig a big hole, removing some of the soil, add some fresh topsoil from elsewhere, add Rootgrow in such a way that it will be in direct contact with the rootball, and plant the rose in the same spot and risk a biscuit, so to speak. Worked for me before when I replanted with six new roses in old positions, but then rose sickness doesn't always occur...

It was me that said that buying the mycorrhizal was not worth it. I was quoting Professor Alistair Fitter who is an expert on mycorrhizal associations. He was asked at our local HPS meeting about replanting roses and he said good practice would suggest not planting in the same place if the previous rose had been diseased. he suggested adding fresh soil to the planting hole. garden soil is bursting with 100's of fungi and as the gc cant begin to identify which fungi they are offering it is a waste of money. he said the only time he would consider it is if he was planting into sterile media but he agreed that just adding a trowel full of soil would do the job just as well.

Brilliant - thank you all, I have a binful of good compost just emptied out and waiting for a woman with fork...and I've just dug the veg plot so there's plenty of soil to mix it with.
There should be plenty of little fungi in that lot. (There was a slow worm too but that's not really relevant...)