More than 7,300 Afghans to be resettled in UK after MoD data leak, says National Audit Office | Ministry of Defence

Greater than 7,300 Afghans are anticipated to be resettled within the UK on account of a significant authorities information breach, in keeping with a Nationwide Audit Workplace report that raises doubts over officers’ claims of a £850m price.The unintentional leak by an MoD official in 2022 of 18,700 Afghans’ particulars who had labored with or for the British authorities led to the opening of a brand new route by which these endangered might search relocation to the UK from their dwelling nation.The MoD expects 7,355 individuals to be resettled via the Afghanistan response route (ARR) as a direct results of the breach, together with the relations of these instantly affected, the NAO mentioned.The watchdog mentioned the federal government was unable to calculate the precise price of its response. The £850m estimate didn’t embody authorized prices or compensation claims, and doubts had been raised by the NAO concerning the “completeness and accuracy” of the bottom determine.The NAO mentioned: “The MoD estimates that, as of July 2025, the federal government had spent round £400m on resettling individuals via the ARR and that it could spend round an additional £450m on the scheme.“The MoD estimated the prices to the entire of presidency to be £128,000 per resettled particular person, of which an estimated £53,000 can be met by the MoD. On the time of publication, the MoD had not supplied us with ample proof to offer us confidence relating to the completeness and accuracy of those estimates.”The spreadsheet by chance shared by the MoD comprised 33,345 strains of knowledge containing the names and call particulars of candidates and, in some cases, info regarding the candidates’ relations.The NAO mentioned the MoD didn’t report precisely how a lot it had spent on resettling individuals via the ARR scheme as a result of it didn’t individually determine these prices in its accounting system.The federal government mentioned it did this to take care of the secrecy of the ARR scheme whereas a superinjunction was in place stopping disclosure of each the information breach and the existence of the injunction itself.After the invention of the information breach on 25 August 2023, the MoD had utilized to the excessive court docket for an injunction to forestall the information loss turning into public. Seven days later, the court docket granted a superinjunction – which additionally prevented disclosure of the existence of the injunction itself, when a choose accepted the MoD’s evaluation of danger to the protection and lives of many people and their households.skip previous publication promotionGet the day’s headlines and highlights emailed direct to you each morningPrivacy Discover: Newsletters could include details about charities, on-line adverts, and content material funded by outdoors events. In case you do not need an account, we’ll create a visitor account for you on theguardian.com to ship you this article. You’ll be able to full full registration at any time. For extra details about how we use your information see our Privateness Coverage. We use Google reCaptcha to guard our web site and the Google Privateness Coverage and Phrases of Service apply.after publication promotionA subsequent evaluate in January 2025 urged that the fee and scale of opening the brand new route for relocation was not proportionate to the extra danger to these whose information had been breached. The defence secretary, John Healey, closed the ARR and the injunction on reporting was dropped in July.Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the chair of the cross-party public accounts committee, mentioned: “After the excessive court docket superinjunction was lifted earlier this yr, confusion nonetheless stays over the reported £850m historic and future prices regarding the breach, with the MoD unable to supply ample assurance over their numbers.“This determine doesn’t embody all authorized prices or compensation claims, which at the moment stay unknown. The PAC shall be analyzing these points in our inquiry subsequent week and I shall be following developments intently because the NAO conducts additional work to supply transparency on the figures of their upcoming report on Afghan resettlement schemes, with lots of these needing relocation but to reach within the UK.”