The British government still doesn’t know how much it will cost to relocate thousands of Afghans whose personal details were exposed in a massive Ministry of Defence data leak, the National Audit Office (NAO) has warned.
The MoD has put the price tag of the breach and the emergency relocation program it created at £850 million. But the NAO says there isn’t enough evidence to trust that figure, which also excludes legal fees and likely compensation claims.
The 2022 leak exposed the names, contact details and family information of almost 19,000 Afghans who had applied to move to the UK, fearing Taliban reprisals for working with British forces during the war. Details of UK special forces members and other British officials were also included. The data was mistakenly emailed by an MoD official and later appeared on Facebook.
At the time, more than 16,000 Afghans were already eligible under an existing resettlement scheme. In response to the breach, a secret program called the Afghanistan Response Route (ARR) was launched in April 2024, allowing another 7,000 people to move to Britain.
The government kept the leak hidden for nearly two years under a High Court super-injunction, which was only lifted in July. Defence Secretary John Healey later apologized, calling it one of the worst security failures in recent memory.
The MoD estimates the cost of resettling each Afghan at £128,000, with the total bill for all resettlement schemes expected to surpass £2 billion. But the NAO says the ministry cannot even track what it has spent on the ARR program because it failed to account for it separately.
“The MoD is not able to determine exactly what it has spent on resettling people through the ARR scheme,” the watchdog said. “These costs were not visible in its management accounts, but instead included within total Afghan resettlement spending.”
The NAO estimates that more than 27,000 people could ultimately be resettled through the ARR and other schemes.
An MoD spokesperson said the ministry remains committed to transparency and to supporting Afghans who worked with British forces. “The cost of all Afghan resettlement schemes, including the Afghan Response Route, has been fully funded as part of the Government’s Spending Review,” the spokesperson said.
