On 13 July 2026, the Immigration and Asylum Bill is scheduled to receive its second reading in the House of Commons. Public attention has fixed on Part 2 and its Article 8 clauses. This post is about Part 1 (clauses 1-16 and Schedules 1-3), which has attracted less commentary but may prove the more consequential. It abolishes the First-tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) as the forum for immigration and asylum appeals, replacing it with the Independent Immigration Appeals Authority (“IIAA”): hearings from late 2027, a period of parallel running, then full transfer of the jurisdiction.

The Government’s case is capacity. The March 2026 call for evidence recorded 139,000 open appeals in the First-tier Tribunal at the end of December 2025; by the time the Bill was introduced, ministers were citing more than 150,000, with an average of 61 weeks to determine an appeal. Nobody doubts the crisis, whose cost is borne first by appellants. The argument here is narrower: whatever its merits as caseload management, Part 1 relocates the adjudication of disputes between the individual and the Secretary of State — in practice, the Home Secretary — to a body whose structural features (appointments, sponsorship, rule-making, even the timetable of proceedings) are anchored in that same office. Jonathan Collinson asked on this blog in April how such a body could be made accountable. The Bill’s publication on 30 June poses a prior question: whether the design satisfies the domestic law of institutional independence — the standard applied to adjudicative bodies entangled with their sponsoring departments in R (Brooke) v Parole Board and Starrs v Ruxton. My answer is that it is very difficult to see how the design satisfies that standard unless Parliament supplies structural guarantees absent from the Bill as introduced. As I suggest at the end, a short set of amendments would supply them — and their fate would test whether the Government means what the Authority’s name says.

What Part 1 does — safeguards included

A fair analysis starts with what the Bill says in its own favour. Clause 1 requires the Authority to exercise its appellate function with a view to ensuring that justice is done, and to aim to be accessible, fair and independent as well as quick and efficient. Clause 1(6) imposes a duty on every Minister of the Crown to uphold the IIAA’s independence — providing, in language lifted almost verbatim from section 3(5) of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, that ministers “must not seek to influence particular decisions of the IIAA through any special access” to adjudicators. Schedule 2 requires selection on merit through fair and open competition, and places the Authority and its people outside the Crown: the IIAA is not a servant or agent of the Crown, and its members and employees are not Crown servants. An onward appeal to the Upper Tribunal on points of law is retained. The question is not whether these safeguards exist but whether they can bear the weight the structure places on them.

Set against them are six design choices.

First, the appointments cascade. Under clause 2 the Chair, the Professional Standards Officer, the first Chief Executive and the first Chief Appeals Officer are appointed by the Secretary of State; subsequent Chief Executives and Chief Appeals Officers by the Chair, after consulting the Professional Standards Officer; and adjudicators — the people who decide appeals — by the Chief Executive. Every decision-maker in the system therefore holds office at one or two removes from the respondent in the Authority’s core appellate jurisdiction. Legal qualification is required only at the top: the Professional Standards Officer and Chief Appeals Officer must have been qualified lawyers for five years, and senior adjudicators for two, unless the Chief Executive considers they have gained equivalent experience in law-related activities — a test borrowed from section 52 of the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007 — but where the 2007 Act leaves that judgment to the relevant decision-maker in a judicial-appointments scheme, the Bill assigns it to the Chief Executive. Executive adjudicators need no legal qualification at all; the Government’s own call for evidence anticipated that the majority of adjudicators would not need the legal training or judicial experience currently expected of the tribunal’s immigration judges. Recruitment sits with the Authority (after initial Home Office-run competitions), not with the Judicial Appointments Commission.

Second, sponsorship. The IIAA sits in the Home Office’s orbit rather than the Ministry of Justice’s — the judiciary were reportedly informed of the November 2025 announcement a day before the public — and the financial architecture points the same way: Schedule 2 routes the Authority’s annual reports and accounts through the Secretary of State, and permits financial assistance subject to conditions.

Third, the rules. Schedule 3 replaces the Tribunal Procedure Rules with IIAA Procedure Rules made not by the judicially-led Tribunal Procedure Committee — whose statutory objectives under the 2007 Act include securing that justice is done — but by a bespoke IIAA Procedure Rules Board composed of the Authority’s own leadership: the Chief Executive, the Chief Appeals Officer, the Professional Standards Officer and standing members appointed by the Chair (clauses 4 and 5). The rules take the form of statutory instruments subject to the negative procedure, the Statutory Instruments Act 1946 applying as if the Board were a Minister of the Crown. One welcome feature: Schedule 3 requires rules providing for publication of the IIAA’s decisions, subject to exceptions — a transparency gain parliamentarians should preserve whatever else happens to Part 1.

Fourth, the clock. Clause 8 empowers the Secretary of State to make regulations prescribing the periods within which the IIAA must decide appeals and bail applications or take other steps in proceedings. Clause 9 permits the Secretary of State to request that a particular appeal be decided, or a particular step taken, by a specified date; the Authority must then approve or decline the request, and may decline only where compliance would not be reasonably practicable or would not be in the interests of justice. But the request power belongs to one party alone, and the drafting default runs toward approval. One party — and only one — is handed a statutory lever over the timetable of the tribunal that judges its case.

Fifth, the channelling of challenge. Clause 1(8) permits decisions of the IIAA to be questioned in legal proceedings only through the Bill’s internal review mechanism and its appeal to the Upper Tribunal — to which clause 7 applies the post-Cart ouster in section 11A of the 2007 Act, making a refusal of permission, with narrow exceptions, final. Judicial review of the first-instance body is designed out.

Sixth, oversight is internalised into the Home Office family: the reporting function over the Authority goes to the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration — an office the Secretary of State appoints — reporting annually and additionally at the Secretary of State’s request, with the Secretary of State laying the reports before Parliament and empowered to omit material before doing so. Inspection is a valuable audit; it is not an independence guarantee.

Even clause 1’s objectives repay a second reading: alongside accessibility, fairness and independence, the Authority must have regard to the public interest and, in particular, to its place as a key part of the immigration and asylum system — a statutory instruction to an adjudicative body to see itself as a component of the machinery whose outputs it reviews.

A settlement half a century in the making

The Franks Report of 1957 settled that tribunals belong to the machinery of adjudication, not of administration. The adjudicators created by the Immigration Appeals Act 1969 were nonetheless appointed by the Home Secretary, who also made the rules of appeal procedure. After sustained criticism on independence grounds, both functions were transferred to the Lord Chancellor, with appointments moving in 1987. The Leggatt Review of 2001 generalised the lesson — a tribunal cannot be seen to be independent while it depends for appointments, budget and administration on the department whose decisions it reviews — and the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007 built the answer: a unified, judicially-led structure, Judicial Appointments Commission recruitment, a judicially-chaired rules committee and, by section 1, the extension of the Constitutional Reform Act’s guarantee of continued judicial independence to the tribunal judiciary. The single-tier Asylum and Immigration Tribunal, a previous speed-driven design, lasted five years before being folded into that structure in 2010. Part 1 is the first excision of an entire jurisdiction from the unified system since 2007, and the jurisdiction chosen is the one in which the state is always the same party. IIAA adjudicators, not being judges or listed office-holders, appears to sit outside the section 3 guarantee, the Commission’s remit and the tribunal judiciary’s disciplinary and welfare structures. The Bill does not so much breach the statutory architecture of judicial independence as design around it — while, as clause 1(6) shows, borrowing its vocabulary.

Independence is a finding, not a name

The Government’s human rights memorandum frames the Part 1 independence question principally through Article 13. That is understandable: the Strasbourg starting point, following Maaouia v France, is that decisions on the entry, stay and removal of “aliens” do not generally determine civil rights for Article 6 purposes. On the memorandum’s analysis, an effective remedy need not be judicial, but it must come from an authority sufficiently independent of those responsible for the alleged violation — a standard the IIAA is said to meet through merit-based appointments, arm’s-length governance, the Rules Board, the ministerial duty and inspectorate oversight.

But domestic law does not stop where Article 6 stops. Where a body adjudicates disputes between the individual and the executive, the common law requires it to be, and to appear to be, independent and impartial, judged through the eyes of the fair-minded and informed observer (Magill v Porter). And the courts have twice condemned adjudicative structures on objective grounds without any criticism of the individuals within them. In Starrs v Ruxton the High Court of Justiciary held that temporary sheriffs, holding short renewable appointments in the gift of the executive, lacked the security of tenure that independence requires. In R (Brooke) v Parole Board the Court of Appeal held that the Parole Board — whose members’ integrity nobody questioned, and which had formal safeguards of its own — lacked objective independence of its sponsoring department by reason of the sponsorship relationship, the funding arrangements and the department’s role in appointments. The defect was structural, and the remedy had to be structural.

Run the IIAA through Brooke. Every senior officer traces appointment to the respondent in every appeal; the adjudicators are appointed by a Chief Executive whom that respondent, or its appointee, selected; the body is situated and funded within the respondent’s departmental ecosystem, its reports and accounts passing through the respondent’s hands; its procedure rules are made by a board of its own leadership standing downstream of the same appointments; and the respondent enjoys unilateral statutory powers over its timetable. On this analysis, if the Parole Board’s looser entanglement failed the objective test, it is hard to see why this structure should pass it. The Authority’s statutory name will not assist: the lesson of Starrs and Brooke is that independence is a conclusion drawn from structure, not a designation conferred by statute. Nor will clause 1(6). The Constitutional Reform Act’s formula was written for a judiciary whose appointment, tenure and rule-making sit outside the executive; transplanted into a body where none of those conditions holds, the words supply the grammar of independence without its machinery.

Two caveats keep this argument honest. If enacted, Part 1 could not simply be quashed for failing common law standards: Parliament is sovereign, and the courts’ tools against the Act itself would be limited to interpretation and, at most, declarations under the Human Rights Act. But that understates three things. The first is interpretation itself. Under the principle of legality, fundamental common law rights — including access to a court and, where the state creates an adjudicative body to determine disputes between the individual and the executive, adjudication by an independent and impartial tribunal — cannot be overridden by general or ambiguous words: if Parliament intends to authorise what the common law would otherwise condemn, it must, in the words of R v Secretary of State for the Home Department, ex parte Simms, “squarely confront what it is doing and accept the political cost”. Some of Part 1 leaves little interpretive room: the appointments cascade, for example, says who appoints whom. But that clarity is not a licence to read every delegated power at its widest. What the drafting leaves open — the scope of clause 8 regulations, the circumstances in which clause 9 requests are approved or declined, and the content of the Procedure Rules — would fall to be read against the structural entanglement described above and, where possible, in favour of the independence that clause 1 itself proclaims. Clause 1(8), too, should be construed no more broadly than its words require: as a channelling provision, not as excluding supervisory control beyond what Parliament has squarely stated. R (Privacy International) v Investigatory Powers Tribunal supplies the background presumption; the post-Cart section 11A shows how specifically Parliament now drafts when it seeks a partial ouster. The Bill’s own vocabulary would become the instrument of its narrow reading. The second is the constitutional point: Parliament would be legislating against a settled baseline for the design of adjudicative bodies. The third is the litigation exposure of everything beneath the Act. The IIAA Procedure Rules and the clause 8 and 9 regulations are secondary legislation, reviewable on orthodox public law and Human Rights Act grounds, subject to the scope of the enabling Act; and the last speed-driven redesign of asylum adjudication ended with the Court of Appeal in R (Detention Action) v First-tier Tribunal quashing the 2014 Fast Track Rules as ultra vires and structurally unfair — rules made by the judicially-led committee itself, with finality consequences the Supreme Court was still unwinding in TN (Vietnam). Rules written by the Authority’s own leadership, against ministerial time-limit regulations, for a caseload in which many appellants are unrepresented, invite a systemic-unfairness challenge early in their life. Nor can the Upper Tribunal valve relieve the pressure both ways at once. With a first-instance corps drawn substantially from non-lawyers, error-of-law appeals will grow; either the permission gate widens, and the promised speed evaporates a tier up, or it does not, and the sufficiency of the remedy thins — re-engaging Article 13, the common law of access to justice (R (UNISON) v Lord Chancellor) and the substantive demands of an effective appeal (R (Kiarie and Byndloss)) — now from behind a section 11A ouster.

The amendment test

None of this argues that the tribunal system is beyond reform: the 2007 Act is itself proof that Parliament can redesign adjudication radically and well. But the 2007 settlement was the solution to a problem, and Part 1 re-creates the problem while borrowing the vocabulary of the solution. ILPA and the Public Law Project have already sounded the rule-of-law alarm; the task at second reading is to turn that concern into a concrete test of the Government’s intentions — and one is readily to hand. If the Government means the Authority’s name, a set of amendments follows almost mechanically: appointments administered by the Judicial Appointments Commission; statutory security of tenure for adjudicators; rule-making returned to a judicially-led committee on the Tribunal Procedure Committee model; sponsorship located outside the Home Office; the clause 8 and 9 timetable powers mutualised or deleted; and the clause 1(8) channelling provision opened. Each amendment is modest; none is inconsistent with speed. The revealing question is what remains of the case for leaving the unified tribunal structure once they are made — because if the answer is nothing, then the features the amendments would remove are not incidents of the scheme. They are the scheme.

In 1957 Franks asked whether tribunals belong to the world of adjudication or the world of administration. On 13 July, sixty-nine years later, the question is back on the order paper.

Hleb Buziuk is an Independent Scholar.

(Suggested citation: H. Buziuk, ‘Independent by Assertion: The Immigration and Asylum Bill and the Re-Departmentalisation of Adjudication’, U.K. Const. L. Blog (13th July 2026) (available at https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/))