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| Thousands of Afghans relocated to UK under secret scheme after data leak | |
| (about 1 hour later) | |
| MoD sought to cover up scheme costing £2bn after details of Afghans who had worked with UK released in error | |
| Personal information about more 33,000 Afghans seeking relocation to the UK after the Taliban takeover was released in error by a defence official – and the Ministry of Defence tried for nearly two years to cover up the leak and its consequences | |
| Fears that the individuals named would be at risk from reprisals from the Taliban led the previous government to set up a secret relocation scheme, the Afghan Response Route, involving 20,000 people at a cost running in the order £2bn. | |
| At noon on Tuesday, the high court judge Mr Justice Chamberlain announced that a superinjunction first obtained by the MoD in August 2023 would be lifted, allowing the leak and secret relocation scheme reported for the first time. | |
| In his ruling, Chamberlain described the cost of the plans – which the MoD sought to keep secret – as amounting to “the sort of money which makes a material difference to government spending plans and is normally the stuff of political debate”. | |
| The dataset contained personal information about 33,000 Afghans who had applied for one of two schemes run to allow people who had worked with the UK in Afghanistan to come to Britain with their families. | |
| It was released in error by an official and subsequently was published on a Facebook page. When that came to the attention of the MoD, the department first applied for a superinjuction in September 2023, preventing its disclosure and reporting about it. | |
| The presiding judge said on Tuesday that he had decided at first to maintain the superinjunction at a hearing in November 2023 because he had been told by the MoD that if the Taliban became aware of the existence of the leaked data and obtained it, “many thousands” of those listed “could be killed or injured”. | |
| However, at a hearing last month the judge received a copy of a review undertaken by a retired civil servant, Paul Rimmer, on behalf of the government of the relocation scheme, which led to Tuesday’s ruling. | |
| In the review, Rimmer concluded that the acquisition of the dataset by the Taliban was “unlikely to substantially change an individual’s existing exposure given the volume of data already available”. It was unlikely, Rimmer said, that “merely being on the dataset would be grounds for targeting”. | |
| Chamberlain said the conclusions of that report “fundamentally undermine the evidential basis” on which he and the court of appeal in separate hearings had relied to decide that the MoD superinjunction should be upheld. | |
| Labour has now decided to halt the previously secret Afghan Response Scheme, which has so far cost £400m and will cost a further £450m. Stopping it will save a further £1.2bn it is understood. | |
| In the summer of 2021, the US decided to lead a withdrawal of western forces from Afghanistan, allowing the Taliban to takeover in August. That left tens of thousands of people who had helped the UK and other countries during two decades of western military presence in the country at risk of reprisals. | |
| More details soon … | More details soon … |