More than 7,300 Afghans are expected to be resettled in the UK as a result of a major government data breach, according to a National Audit Office (NAO) report that raises doubts over officials' claims of an £850m cost.
The accidental leak by a Ministry of Defence (MoD) official in 2022 of 18,700 Afghans' details who had worked with or for the British government led to the opening of a new route by which those endangered could seek relocation to the UK. The MoD expects 7,355 people to be resettled through the Afghanistan response route (ARR) as a direct result of the breach, including family members.
The NAO said the government was unable to calculate the exact cost of its response. The £850m estimate did not include legal costs or compensation claims, and doubts were raised about the “completeness and accuracy” of the base figure. The MoD estimated costs of £128,000 per resettled individual, but the NAO stated it had not provided sufficient evidence to give confidence in these estimates.
The spreadsheet accidentally shared comprised 33,345 lines of data containing names and contact details of applicants and, in some instances, information about their family members. The MoD did not record exactly how much it spent on resettling people through the ARR because it did not separately identify these costs in its accounting system, citing the need to maintain secrecy while a superinjunction was in place.
A subsequent review in January 2025 suggested that the cost and scale of opening the new route were not proportionate to the additional risk to those whose data had been breached. The defence secretary, John Healey, closed the ARR and the injunction on reporting was dropped in July.
