Thousands of Afghans who worked with the UK and their families were brought to Britain in a secret programme after a 2022 data breach put their lives at risk, the British government revealed on Tuesday.
Defence Minister John Healey unveiled the scheme to parliament after the UK High Court on Tuesday lifted a super-gag order banning any reports of the events.
In February 2022, a spreadsheet containing the names and details of almost 19,000 Afghans who had asked to be relocated to Britain was accidentally leaked by a UK official just six months after Taliban fighters seized Kabul, Healey said.
“This was a serious departmental error,” Healey said, adding: “Lives may have been at stake.”
The previous Conservative government put in place a secret programme in April 2024 to help those “judged to be at the highest risk of reprisals by the Taliban”, he said.
Some 900 Afghans and 3,600 family members have now been brought to Britain or are in transit under the programme known as the Afghan Response Route, at a cost of around GBP400 million ($535 million), Healey said.
Applications from 600 more people have also been accepted, bringing the estimated total cost of the scheme to GBP850 million.
They are among some 36,000 Afghans who have been accepted by Britain under different schemes since the August 2021 fall of Kabul.
As Labour’s opposition defence spokesman, Healey was briefed on the scheme in December 2023 but the Conservative government asked a court to impose a “super-injunction” banning any mention of it in parliament or by the press.
When Labour came to power in July 2024, the scheme was in full swing but Healey said he had been “deeply uncomfortable to be constrained from reporting” to parliament.
“Ministers decided not to tell parliamentarians at an earlier stage about the data incident, as the widespread publicity would increase the risk of the Taliban obtaining the dataset,” he explained.
Healey set up a review of the scheme when he became defence minister in the new Labour government.
This concluded there was “very little evidence of intent by the Taliban to conduct a campaign of retribution”.
The Afghan Response Route has now been closed, the minister said, apologising for the data breach which “should never have happened”.
He estimated the total cost of relocating people from Afghanistan to Britain at between GBP5.5 billion to GBP6 billion.
Conservative party defence spokesman James Cartlidge also apologised for the leak which happened under the previous Tory government.
But he defended the decision to keep it secret, saying the aim had been to avoid “an error by an official of the British state leading to torture or even murder of persons in the dataset at the hands of what remains a brutal Taliban regime”.
Healey said all those brought to the UK from Afghanistan had been accounted for in the country’s immigration figures.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has vowed to cut the number of migrants arriving in Britain.
In 2023, the UK defence ministry was fined GBP350,000 by a data watchdog for disclosing personal information of 265 Afghans seeking to flee Taliban fighters in the chaotic fall of Kabul two years earlier.
Britain’s Afghanistan evacuation plan was widely criticised, with the government accused by MPs of “systemic failures of leadership, planning and preparation”.
Hundreds of Afghans eligible for relocation were left behind, many with their lives potentially at risk after details of staff and job applicants were left at the abandoned British embassy in Kabul.
