What we certainly know about them all is that before they got here they have travelled through safe countries—more than one in many cases—and failed to claim asylum. The hon. Lady is right that we are probably too lax in how we process claims. Certainly, we offer asylum to more applicants than France. On average, we grant a higher proportion of asylum claims than most European countries.
We know, too, that the failure to remove those people costs the British taxpayer an immense amount of money. When I looked at the figures, I was staggered. The cost of asylum is now £3.97 billion. It is extraordinary that a single matter should cost so much. The need for the Bill is justified alone on the basis that we can no longer afford to deal with the current scale of illegal migration. We simply cannot afford for it to continue, as the British sense of fair play has been tested to its limits. The public see that, and they are increasingly disillusioned by the apparent inability and unwillingness of the political elite in this country—we are the political elite, like it or not—to accept the facts.
Progress has been made in clearing the backlog, largely as a result of the efforts of my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick) and my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Fareham (Suella Braverman). During their stewardship of the Home Office, they focused resources on processing claims more quickly and had considerable success in doing so. But the problem is that as fast as we process people, more arrive.
Until we deal with the root of the problem, we can never really tackle the cost I described nor the disillusion felt by our constituents. That is why the Prime Minister pledged to stop the boats. In order to do so, we need an Act that is as effective as possible. The amendments in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark, which I strongly support, would ensure just that. Amendments 11 to 18 deal in particular with the Human Rights Act 1998. Taken together, they would fully disapply the Act from the Bill and the Illegal Migration Act 2023, particularly in relation to removals to Rwanda.
A lot of nonsense was spoken earlier about rights; indeed, a lot of nonsense prevails in this House about rights. Rights are fundamentally important. We believe in the essential rights that characterise our country: the right to a fair trial; the right to go about one’s business freely and unimpaired; the right not to be arrested without cause; the right to vote in free and fair elections. Those are important parts of what it is to be British, but they do not spring from the ether. They are not a given—it is a liberal myth that rights are natural. Rights are the product of decent Governments in decent places doing the right thing. They are special because we have chosen them, not because they were given to us by some ethereal source. The hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), whom I like and respect,
will know, because he knows scripture even better than me, that rights do not get a mention in the ten commandments or the Sermon on the Mount. Perhaps he can find a part in either of those to contradict me.