President of the Courts of England and Wales gives evidence before the Commons Justice Committee
The House of Commons Justice Committee today published the transcript of last week's evidence session with the Lady Chief Justice, Baroness Carr of Walton-on-the-Hill.
Image credit: UK Government In the wide-ranging session, Baroness Carr revealed that the judiciary were given just 24 hours' notice of Government plans to abolish the Immigration and Asylum Chamber of the First-tier Tribunal. Earlier last month, the Home Office published a policy paper outlining major reforms to the asylum system, including proposals to create a new independent body, staffed by professionally trained adjudicators, to determine asylum appeals.
When asked by the Committee to clarify what she understood about the proposed new adjudicators, the Lady Chief Justice said it was her understanding that the Government intended to abolish the First-tier Tribunal of the Immigration and Asylum Chamber altogether. She stressed, however, that she had been given almost no advance information about the plans.
The transcript records the following exchange:
Q8 Chair: You mentioned in your introduction, Baroness Carr, changes to adjudication in the asylum system. We have written to the Home Secretary with a whole series of questions about that because we are not quite clear about the nature of these new adjudicators; where they will come from; how that will speed up the process; how much money is attached to that; and how this one decision, one appeal system would work. Can you shed any light on that?
Baroness Carr of Walton-on-the-Hill: No. I do not think I am in a position to do so. The decision is obviously a policy decision. As ever, we will stand ready to respect the will of Parliament in whatever it decides to bring in and what changes it chooses to make. We will respect parliamentary sovereignty in the normal way. However, as to the mechanics of it I am not in a position to share anything. What I can tell you is that we were given little to no notice at all about the decision to abolish the asylum chamber.
Q9 Chair: To be clear, that is what is happening to the first-tier tribunal.
Baroness Carr of Walton-on-the-Hill: That is what I understand the public announcements have stated. We were given 24 hours' notice of that development. I have made it extremely clear that I will do everything I can to lead and support the current judges who are sitting in that jurisdiction and have little to no information as to what their future looks like in terms of timelines and the like.
Q10 Chair: Where does this leave the upper tribunal and the opportunity for judicial review?
Baroness Carr of Walton-on-the-Hill: I am sticking to script here, Chair, in the sense that I do not have a script, but I am being careful because I am not sure how much is in the public domain. My understanding is that there will be a route of appeal to the upper tribunal from the independent body of adjudicators. As I say, it is very early days. The new Senior President of Tribunals, Lord Justice Dingemans, and I are doing everything we can to look after, if I can put it that way, the immigration and asylum judges who have this news to grapple with.
Baroness Carr noted that the immigration tribunal currently has 87 full-time judges and 250 fee-paid judges, and that its caseload has "rocketed," rising by 45% in 2025 compared with 2024, That trend, she said, is "only going upwards" at a faster pace in the future. She further noted that the Immigration and Asylum Chamber had been piloting the use of AI to produce transcripts since January and it had proved "a great success". She continued: "I hope that it will be rolled out. There are bids for that work to be carried out. That is a very positive development, and I am sure that it holds massive potential for the future."
Regarding the recently announced plans to publish decisions of the First-tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber), the Lady Chief Justice clarified that their previous non-publication was due to purely practical reasons and resource constraints rather than any opposition from the judiciary. She told the Committee:
"I want to move on, in the open access space, to one final topic before rounding up. That is the publication of decisions from the immigration and asylum chamber. There has been a bit of a false narrative going on here. The narrative that I have been sensing, rightly or wrongly, is that somehow judges have been standing in the way of the publication of first-tier tribunal immigration and asylum decisions. If there is such a narrative, it is not only inaccurate but entirely unfair. The only thing that has been holding back the publication of transcripts from first-tier tribunal decisions is resources. In May, I set up a taskforce to look at what we could do to get publication of these decisions, and that taskforce has put forward a bid and a model for the work to take place.
"I do not know what impression you have of the volume of decisions we are talking about every year, but please bear in mind that it is 30,000 and more. So if, for example, the National Archives, which is where all other judgments get published at the moment, were to take on that sort of volume, it would be a major undertaking; or you would have to set up a new engine to cope with the publication of these decisions. I want to make it absolutely clear that, way before the debate appeared to be taking place in public, we, the judiciary, were on it with a taskforce, looking at ways of publishing these decisions. It is all part of my constant theme, which is that the more there is access to and public understanding of the work we do and the judgments we produce, the better. It is, as far as I am concerned, a one-way street. I thought that information might be useful for the Committee."
Also during the evidence session, the Lady Chief Justice addressed recent political and media attacks on immigration judges. These have included criticisms by Shadow Home Secretary Robert Jenrick, who has highlighted judges' past comments and associations in an effort to question their neutrality. Baroness Carr stated she "deprecate[s] the phrase 'activist judges'," explaining that judges are merely required to make legal decisions "in a highly politically charged environment on highly politically charged issues." She rejected the practice of examining a judge's former political affiliations or pro bono work to suggest bias, calling such an approach "not a healthy or appropriate" way to question judicial neutrality.
She told the Committee: "The narrative of digging into a judge's past and what political party they belonged to, whether they did pro bono work for an asylum charity and the suggestion that that somehow creates actual or apparent bias in the mind of that person sitting five years later in an immigration chamber is not a proposition that would be acceptable to anybody who understands the rules. Maybe there is more to be done in improving public understanding of what I am talking about, but the rules are very simple. If there is some connection or proper basis on which to say there is an appearance of bias, or actual bias, the Home Office, for example, is extremely well placed to raise a challenge and invite the judge to recuse themselves. My experience is that judges are incredibly careful when it comes to issues of bias. They over-declare or tend to over-share on the basis that that is the safest course to take so it can never come back to bite you. I recognise the phrase [activist judges'] because I have seen it, heard it and read it, but I do not see it in my judges and I do not think it is a healthy or appropriate approach. As I say, it is confusing the fact that judges are making legal decisions in arenas that are highly politically charged."
The Lady Chief Justice had earlier warned the Committee of the serious consequences of public attacks on judges, including risks to personal safety, the rule of law, and public confidence. She stated:
"One of the problems of the world we now live in, with social media, is that the reach is so fast and widespread, it is impossible to wind the clock back. Once the narrative is out on social media, you cannot bring it back in and you cannot correct it. It will be there forever.
"To reflect on the particular instance that I think the Committee will have in mind of debate in Parliament, it seems to me that with parliamentary privilege and all the protections that it carries comes a heavy responsibility. The responsibility is to debate responsibly, fairly and accurately. Get your facts right; then there can be no legitimate complaint, subject to attacking individual judges' integrity, and so on and so forth. That was the issue for me. As I say, the immediate trigger was what happened to the judges on the ground in terms of their personal security; but I do think you can break the consequences of this sort of event down into four particular categories. They all matter, but on different levels.
"The first level is the threat to the rule of law and the democratic process, because if things are being presented in a way that is inaccurate, in Parliament and then in the media and beyond, politicians and members of the public are going to be making decisions about, for example, whether or not to leave the convention on a completely flawed premise: is there a need or not? That seems to me a fundamental threat to the rule of law and the democratic process.
"The next level is the security concerns that I have referred to. The next level is the pragmatic challenge for me in this context when this happens, which is in recruitment, retention and getting judges to sit in these jurisdictions. You know from my evidence last year that the overwhelming percentage of judges in immigration and asylum are fee-paid. They can vote with their feet. They are not employed. They are not full-time judges; 70% of tribunal judges are fee-paid. So I pose the question, rhetorically: if, when you sit in that jurisdiction, you are at risk or your judgments are at risk of ridicule and inaccurate reporting on a flawed premise, why would you? So it is recruitment, retention and the business-as-usual case: how do I keep business as usual going?
"The fourth level at which I respectfully suggest this sort of incident has repercussions is public confidence. I said at the beginning that trust in the judiciary rightly remains high, but that cannot be taken for granted, and every incident that undermines that trust needs to be fully justified and thoroughly examined.
"There are lots of levels to the concern. To emphasise, the headline is: criticise, disagree—all of that is entirely legitimate and, indeed, welcome; it is part of an open, healthy democracy. But an inaccurate narrative on a flawed premise is, I think, very dangerous, particularly in a parliamentary context where you are ring-fenced. Obviously, judges are not there. They do not have a voice. That is an additional layer of compromise."