The British government said on Tuesday that thousands of Afghans who worked with the UK and their families were sent to Britain under covert circumstances after a 2022 data leak endangered their safety.
Following the UK High Court’s Tuesday lifting of a super-gag order prohibiting any reporting of the events, Defense Minister John Healey presented the plan to parliament.
Six months after Taliban forces took control of Kabul, in February 2022, a UK official unintentionally disclosed a spreadsheet that included the names and personal information of nearly 19,000 Afghans who had requested to be moved to Britain, according to Healey.
“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 £400 million ($535 million), Healey said.
Applications from 600 more people have also been accepted, bringing the estimated total cost of the scheme to £850 million.
Since the fall of Kabul in August 2021, Britain has admitted over 36,000 Afghans under various initiatives.
When Labour took office in July 2024, the plan was in full flow, but Healey stated that he was “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.
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– ‘No retribution’ –
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 £5.5 billion to £6 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.
A data watchdog penalized the UK defence ministry £350,000 in 2023 for revealing the personal information of 265 Afghans fleeing Taliban fighters during the chaotic fall of Kabul two years prior.
Britain’s Afghanistan evacuation strategy was heavily attacked, with MPs accusing the government of “systemic failures of leadership, planning, and preparation”.
Hundreds of Afghans eligible for transfer were left behind, many with their lives at peril, as staff and job applicants’ information was left at the abandoned British embassy in Kabul.
