Should members of the public decide asylum appeals instead of immigration judges?

The plan to let ordinary members of the public decide asylum appeals was comfortably defeated, 15 votes to 6, a 42-point margin that leaves no ambiguity about where this chamber stands on swapping judicial expertise for lay panels.

The clearest pattern sits in the age data. The 25-34 group, the largest single cohort with ten votes, broke hard against the idea at 8-2, while the smaller 35-44 and 45-54 bands were unanimous in opposition. Only the oldest and youngest slivers of the electorate showed any real appetite for it, and those groups were too small to read as more than a curiosity.

Gender told a milder version of the same story: men opposed the change by three to one, women by a narrower but still clear margin, suggesting this wasn't a fight between constituencies so much as a broad, cross-cutting distrust of untrained citizens standing in for immigration judges on decisions that can mean removal or asylum. It lands amid a wider argument about capacity versus expertise in the asylum system, one this vote suggests the public is not keen to resolve by deputising itself.

For a government banking on lay panels to unclog the appeals backlog by 2027, the chamber's verdict is unambiguous: speed is not worth the judge.