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The UK government set up a secret multibillion-pound scheme to relocate thousands of Afghans to Britain after a data leak put them at risk of reprisals from the Taliban — and gagged the media with a super-injunction.
The names, contact information and other personal details of about 25,000 Afghans, people who worked closely with the UK before the Taliban seized power and some of their family members, were accidentally disclosed by a British soldier in emails in February 2022.
The leak of the vast, highly sensitive database was not discovered until August 2023 when it was mentioned in a Facebook group. About 100,000 people were put at risk, the government estimated, when wider family members were included. Key facts about the breach are still unpublishable due to a court order.
In response, ministers in Rishi Sunak’s former Conservative government instituted a secret scheme to bring Afghans to the UK.
The plan as recently as February this year, under Sir Keir Starmer’s current Labour administration, was to relocate 25,000 people, at a potential cost of £7bn, according to a government estimate.
February 2025 government memo on reviewing response to data breach
“The current policy response to the [data] incident will mean relocating c25,000 Afghans, who have previously been found ineligible for the [Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy] scheme, but who we assess to be at the highest risk of targeting by the Taleban should they have access to the database. This will mean relocating more Afghans to the UK than have been relocated under the ARAP scheme, at time when the UK’s immigration and asylum system is under significant strain. This will extend the scheme for another 5 years at a cost of c.£7bn. Implementation of the policy has also required unprecedented legal action, in the form of the ‘super injunction’ that has consequences for scrutiny and transparency.”
In recent weeks, as the High Court in London took steps towards lifting the veil on the affair, the government cut short the scheme.
British intelligence had previously assessed that the breach had put the Afghans at risk of murder, torture, harassment and intimidation by the Taliban. The Ministry of Defence said this month that a new review of threats in Afghanistan had found the risk to Afghans still in the country was less than previously thought.
Despite the £7bn estimate revealed in court proceedings, MoD officials said this week that the direct costs of the leak had only ever been estimated at about £2bn, and that the bill for the covert evacuations would now be much lower because the number of eligible Afghans had been reduced.
The revelations come at a time when Britain’s public finances are under heavy strain and the anti-immigration Reform UK opposition party is leading the country’s main establishment parties in the polls.
The High Court has been told that civil servants have warned of the risk of “public disorder” in reaction to news of the secret relocation plan, which comes a year after far-right riots last summer.
To date, the UK government has moved about 18,500 Afghans affected by the data breach to Britain. The MoD said most were already eligible under an existing route. Officials said just 5,500 people were relocated directly because of the breach, with at least a further 2,400 due to come.
Defence secretary John Healey is expected to announce he is closing the secret scheme — known as the Afghan Response Route — to new applicants in a statement to the House of Commons on Tuesday.
Earlier this month, the government also abruptly closed the public schemes — known as the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (Arap) and Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme.
The events can be reported for the first time after the High Court on Tuesday lifted an unparalleled global gagging order that has silenced the press since September 2023. The super-injunction was the first ever to be obtained by the British government.
But a fresh interim injunction granted by the High Court until at least next week means that even now crucial details that explain the severity of the incident cannot be published.
The database was a detailed record of individuals who had applied — in most cases unsuccessfully — under the public Arap scheme, which offered relocation to the UK for those at risk of reprisals after they worked for or alongside the UK before the Taliban retook power.
UK combat operations ended in Afghanistan in 2014 after 13 years, but British troops remained until a chaotic western withdrawal in 2021 that allowed the Taliban’s return.
The UK government did not discover the leak until an anonymous person posted screenshots of the spreadsheet on Facebook in August 2023 and threatened to disclose the entire database.
One of the people familiar with the breach said the database had been sold, at least once, for a five-figure sum.
They claimed that one of the Afghan recipients used their possession of the database as leverage to pressure the government to relocate themselves and 14 family members to the UK.
The identity of the soldier, or whether they have been sanctioned, has not been revealed by the MoD. The department has not successfully contained the leak and it is not known whether the Taliban has obtained the list.
More than 665 Afghans have started a collective legal action to sue the MoD over the data breach, seeking at least £50,000 each, with the potential for thousands more people to join the lawsuit once they learn of the incident and their potential exposure.
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