The following Statement was made in the House of Commons on Tuesday 15 July.
“With permission, Mr Speaker, I wish to make a Statement on a significant data protection breach from February 2022 relating to the Afghan relocations and assistance policy. It led to the High Court granting an unprecedented super-injunction and the previous Government establishing a secret Afghan resettlement route. Today, I am announcing to the House a change in government policy. I am closing that resettlement route, disclosing the data loss and confirming that the court order was lifted at noon today.
Members of this House—including you, Mr Speaker, and me—have been subject to the super-injunction. It is unprecedented. To be clear, the court has always recognised the parliamentary privilege of proceedings in this House, and Ministers decided not to tell parliamentarians about the data incident at an earlier stage, as the widespread publicity would increase the risk of the Taliban obtaining the dataset. However, as parliamentarians and as Ministers, it has been deeply uncomfortable to be constrained from reporting to this House. I am grateful to be able to disclose the details to Parliament today. I trust that you, Mr Speaker, and Members will bear with me if I take the time to ensure that the House now has the fullest information possible, as I discussed with you yesterday.
The facts are as follows. In February 2022, 10 months after the then Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace, introduced the Afghan relocations and assistance policy and six months after the fall of Kabul, a defence official emailed an ARAP case working file outside authorised government systems. As the House knows, ARAP is the resettlement scheme that this country established for Afghan citizens who worked for, or with, our UK Armed Forces over the combat years in Afghanistan. Both in opposition and in government, Labour has backed that scheme, and ARAP has had full support from across this House.
The official mistakenly believed that they were sending the names of 150 applicants. However, the spreadsheet in fact contained personal information associated with 18,714 Afghans who had applied to either the ex gratia scheme or the ARAP scheme on, or before, 7 January 2022. It contained names and contact details of applicants and, in some instances, information relating to applicants’ family members. In a small number of cases, the names of Members of Parliament, senior military officers and government officials were noted as supporting the application. This was a serious departmental error. It was in clear breach of strict data protection protocols, and was one of many data losses relating to the ARAP scheme during this period.
Ministers in the previous Government first became aware of the data loss in mid-August 2023, 18 months after the incident, when personal details of nine individuals from the dataset appeared online. Action was taken to ensure they were swiftly removed, an internal investigation was conducted, and the incident was reported to both the Metropolitan Police and the Information Commissioner. The Met deemed that no criminal investigation was necessary, and the Information Commissioner has continued to work with the department throughout.
However, journalists were almost immediately aware of the breach, and the previous Administration applied to the High Court for an injunction to prevent the data loss becoming public. The judge deemed that the risk warranted going further and, on 1 September 2023, granted a super-injunction, which prevented disclosure of the very existence of the injunction. That super-injunction has been in place for nearly two years, during which time eight media organisations and their journalists were served to prohibit any reporting. No Government wish to withhold information from the British public, parliamentarians or the press in this manner.
In autumn 2023, previous Ministers started work on establishing a new resettlement scheme specifically designed for people in the compromised dataset who were not eligible for ARAP but who were nevertheless judged to be at the highest risk of reprisals by the Taliban. It is known as the Afghanistan response route, or ARR. It was covered by the super-injunction. The then Government initially established the ARR to resettle a target cohort of around 200 principals, but in early 2024 a combination of Ministers’ decisions on the scheme’s policy design and the court’s views had broadened that category to nearly 3,000 principals.
I want to provide assurance to the House and the British public that all individuals relocated under the Afghanistan response route, ARAP or the Home Office’s Afghan citizens resettlement scheme undergo strict national security checks before being able to enter our country. The full number of Afghan arrivals under all schemes has been reported in the regular Home Office statistics, meaning that they are already counted in existing migration figures.
As shadow Defence Secretary, I was initially briefed on the ARR by James Heappey, the former Armed Forces Minister, on 12 December 2023, and issued with the super-injunction at the start of that meeting. Other members of the present Cabinet were only informed of the evidence of the data breach, the operation of the ARR, and the existence of the super-injunction on taking office after the general election. By that time, the ARR scheme was fully established and in operation, and it was nearly two and a half years since the data loss.
I have felt deeply concerned about the lack of transparency to Parliament and to the public. I felt it only right to reassess the decision-making criteria for the ARR. We began, straightaway, to take a hard look at the policy complexities, costs, risks, court hearings and the range of Afghan relocation schemes being run by the previous Government. Cabinet colleagues endorsed the need for new insights in the autumn of last year, while the scheme kept running. In December 2024, I announced the streamlining of the range of government schemes that we inherited into the Afghan resettlement programme to establish better value for money, a single set of time-limited entitlements and support to get Afghan families resettled. On behalf of the House, I sincerely thank our colleagues in local government, without whom this unified resettlement programme would simply not have been possible.
At the beginning of this year, I commissioned Paul Rimmer, a former senior civil servant and ex-Deputy Chief of Defence Intelligence, to conduct an independent review. The review was concluded and reported to Ministers last month. Today I am releasing a public version of Rimmer’s review, and I am placing a copy of it in the Library of the House. I am very grateful to him for his work.
Despite brutal human rights abuses in Afghanistan, the Rimmer review notes the passage of time—it is nearly four years since the fall of Kabul—and concludes:
‘There is little evidence of intent by the Taleban to conduct a campaign of retribution against’
former officials. It also concludes that those who pose a challenge to the Taliban rule now are at greater risk of a reaction from the regime, and that
‘the wealth of data inherited from the former government’