Thousands offered UK asylum in secret scheme after personal data of Afghans who helped British forces leaked by mistake – live | Politics
Healey says 900 Afghans, and with 3,600 family members, have come to UK under secret £400m relocation scheme
rHealey says the leak happened when an official sent an email which he thought had the names of 150 people who were applying for resettlement under the Afghan Resettlement Programme (ARP).
But in fact the email contained the names of almost 19,000 Afghans who had applied for the ARP scheme.
Journalists became aware of the leak, and a court granted a superinjunction preventing reporting of this.
He says eight organisations and journalists have been told not to report what happened under this superinjunction, which has been in place for nearly two years.
He says a scheme was set up to relocate Afghans particularly at risk. It was called the Afghan Response Route (ARR).
He says about 3,000 people were covered by the ARR.
They were subject to strict security checks before admitted to the UK, and they were included in the figures released publicly for the total number of Afghans admitted to the UK.
Healey says, as shadow defence secretary, he was briefed on this. He says he was presented with the superinjunction at the start of that meeting. He says some other cabinet ministers only found out about this scheme after the election.
Coming into office, he was “deeply concerned about the lack of transparency to Parliament and to the public”, he says.
Healey say he set up a review of that scheme. It was carried out by Paul Rimmer. The review concluded there was a limted risk of retaliation by the Taliban to Afghans who were named on the original leak. He says the Taliban would have already have had access to information that might have allowed them to identify these people. He says the review concluded the current ARR policy was an “extremely significant intervention to address the potentially limited net additional risk”.
He says he is closing the scheme today. And the superinjunction has been lifted.
He says about 900 have come to the UK or are in transit under the ARR scheme, with 3,600 family members. It has cost £400m, he says.
He says the MoD has tried to contact everyone affected to the data leak to alert them. It has not been possible to contact everyone, he says. But there is a website where anyone who thinks they might have been on the list can seek information.
And Healey offers an apology to those affected.
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Healey tells MPs, if there are other superinjunctions protecting government secrets, ‘I’ve not been read in’
Healey dodges question about whether soldier was to blame for original data leak
Afghan leak debacle shows problem with ‘liberal imperialist itch’ of Blair/Cameron years, Tory Edward Leigh tells MPs
Healey says cost of relocating Afghans to UK as direct result of data breach will reach about £800m
Tories join Healey in offering apology to Afghans named in leak, and back government’s decision to close secret scheme
Judge suggests he was surprised superinjunction held as long as it did
Conclusions from Rimmer review into ongoing risks posed by Afghan data leak, and future of ARR scheme
Healey apologises to almost 19,000 Afghans whose names were leaked
Healey says 900 Afghans, and with 3,600 family members, have come to UK under secret £400m relocation scheme
Healey says not being able to tell MPs about secret Afghan resettlement route due to superinjunction was ‘deeply uncomfortable’
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UK union leaders express fear over erosion of right to protest in open letter
More than 20 union leaders have expressed their deep concern over the apparent erosion of the right to peaceful protest, piling pressure on the Metropolitan police over its handling of pro-Palestinian marches at the start of the year, Aletha Adu reports.
The Green party says the Afghan data breach revelations today are shocking. In a statement, the Green MP Ellie Chowns said:
It is nothing short of horrifying that a British security breach exposed the personal details of thousands of Afghans who risked everything to stand alongside our forces, leaving them and their families exposed to persecution, torture, or worse at the hands of the Taliban.
It’s truly shocking that proper data protection practices were not in place to prevent such a dangerous event. And though the government has assured parliament that action has been taken to prevent such a leak from happening again, this does not negate the great danger posed to thousands through sheer carelessness.
Climate groups call for UK wealth tax to make super-rich fund sustainable economy
A growing number of climate groups are campaigning for the introduction of a wealth tax to ensure the transition to a sustainable economy is not done “on the backs of the poor”, Matthew Taylor reports.
Healey tells MPs, if there are other superinjunctions protecting government secrets, ‘I’ve not been read in’
In his Substack account of being subject to the superinjunction that prevented reportig of the Afghan data leak, Lewis Goodall says he found himself sitting in court wondering what other information was being held back from the public
The government has spent a huge amount of money on this case. Defending its right to secrecy over our right to know, cloaked under Afghans right to life, but not to know. I worry about where this leaves our democracy, I worry about what precedent it sets, I worry about how easy it is in our system, for the executive to act without restraint. For all of its problems, this could never have happened in the United States, with its first amendment rights, and constitutionally bound freedom of expression. So many times I sat in court 27 and wondered- what else don’t we know? Might there be other courts like this, in other cases? In my view, there never ever should. This case, is about a question as old as politics itself- who guards the guardians?
In the Commons earlier Mark Pritchard (Con) asked John Healey:
How do we know there’s not another superinjunction about another leak? But of course he couldn’t tell us, could he?
In response, Healey, the defence secretary, said: “If there is another superinjunction, I’ve not been read in.”
Lewis Goodall from the News Agents podcast is another of the journalists who was stopped from reporting the Afghan data leak story by the superjunction. He has written a long account of the case on his Substack blog, and he claims that the original superinjunction was unprecedented.
In an emergency online session, the government made the case that the risk to life was so great, that they needed to be sure that knowledge of the incident went no further, by force of law. No-one should be allowed to report anything. Remarkably, the judge involved, Justice Robin Knowles, offered to the government more than they’d requested- indeed, a constitutional innovation. He suggested that they ought to have a superinjunction, ie that not only would I not be not be permitted to report the story, but that I could not even report that I had been prevented from reporting the story. To our knowledge, this has never happened before. Superinjunctions are usually the preserve of celebrities and individuals who, for one reason or another, wish to protect their privacy. It is far rarer for organisations or private companies to employ them, or at least for the courts to grant them. It is unknown for governments to use them to protect their own mistakes.
He also says that, while at first the superinjunction was arguably justified on the grounds that it was needed to protect people before they were relocated, over time the motivation seemed to change.
Eventually, we were summoned to another hearing, where I expected news that the super would be discharged, or at the very least a date where that would happen. To my astonishment, there was no prospect of this- instead the government was changing the rules of the game. It became clear, via the court documents that initially at least, the then Sunak government was not proposing to help very many people as a result of the breach at all- around 200 principals, perhaps up to 1000 in all including family members – 1% of the total number potentially affected and at at least some risk.
Despite the relatively modest efforts to relocate people, the government were not proposing to discharge the injunction. This injunction was no longer about getting people out, but keeping the story in.
Goodall says he ended up concluding the story was being suppressed for political reasons.
With each hearing that went by, I could only feel more and more unease. I had understood the initial justification. But once that slipped away, it felt to me that the motives were darker. Consider the context: the Sunak government at the fag end of its time in office, embattled, under siege. This was a catastrophic data breach and it would be a huge story, embodying their incompetence. It also went to the heart of wider politics. Was it conceivable or credible that politics was not playing a major role in the decision making? It became clear, as part of the court documents, that one of the things which had been discussed at the cabinet subcommittee convened to consider the matter was the pressure on asylum hotels and the fact that it was govt policy to reduce their usage, something which was incompatible with a policy of bringing more people in. This story, two decades and seven governments in the making, went to the heart of domestic politics, in a general election year and no-one had a clue it was happening.
The MoD has now published the full text of John Healey’s statement to MPs about the Afghan data breach, and the secret resettlement scheme set up as a result.
Julian Lewis (Con), a former chair of both the Commons defence and parliament’s intelligence and security committee, told John Healey that he was worried about the decision to close all relocation schemes for Afghans who worked with the British before the Taliban took control again. Lewis said:
What worries me more than the lifting of this superinjunction is the fact that we’ve closed down all the Afghan schemes at the very time that undocumented Afghans who felt it necessary to flee to Iran and to Pakistan are being rounded up for forcible repatriation to an Afghanistan led by the Taliban.
I understand that the investigation over our obligation to the Triples, the special forces that our forces trained, will be continuing, and I welcome that.
Can the secretary of state confirm that despite the closure of the schemes, anybody who is found to have worked very closely with our armed forces, who is in imminent danger, can still be rescued and admitted to this country?
Healey said that Afghans who felt they needed to relocate to Britain had had “ample time” to apply. None of the schemes were existed to become permanent, he said.
He went on:
On the Arap applicants, the sort of Afghans (he) is concerned about, where there are applications in our system remaining to be processed, we will complete that job.
Healey dodges question about whether soldier was to blame for original data leak
In the Commons Lincoln Jopp, a Conservative who led the Scots Guards in 2010 in Afghanistan, asked John Healey about the Times report (see 2.18pm), saying that Larisa Brown had identified a solidier as being to blame. In his opening statement, John Healey just said it was the person was a defence official. Jopp asked Healey if he could be more explicit, and say whether it was a civil servant, or a special adviser, or a solider. He said using the term “defence official” was a practice that “might come back to bite’” Healey if he continued with it.
Healey did not address that question, but he told Jopp: “The challenge I faced, the challenge this government faced was far bigger than the actions of one official that long ago.”
During the statement in the Commons Labour’s Louise Jones, who served in Afghanistan, criticised the way the withdrawal from the country was handled. She said:
I was appalled to watch the chaotic mismanagement following the fall of Kabul, that left Afghans that had served alongside our troops and those who had worked so hard for a better Afghan dangerously exposed. This was a situation that I feared would happen and I could see coming even when I served in Afghanistan in 2017.
The fact is the previous government had plenty of warning that this situation could happen and failed to plan properly for it.
Larisa Brown, defence editor at the Times, was one of the journalists issued with a superinjunction over this story. In her long read on what happened, she offers this account of how the leak occured.
In February 2022, a regular soldier working out of Regent’s Park Barracks — UK special forces headquarters — under Gwyn Jenkins, the director of special forces who was then a major general, made a catastrophic error …
The soldier had been tasked with trying to authenticate Arap applications from former members of the Afghan special forces and others. By attempting to do so, he had inadvertently sent the entire database to a handful of Afghans already brought to the UK who were helping him. They then passed it on to fellow Afghans in Afghanistan who might be able to help. The dataset was sent twice, in two separate incidents, in the same month.
Officially, the incident went unreported. It remained a secret until August 2023, when one of the Afghans who was sent it apparently had his own application for sanctuary rejected.
That was when he threatened to “disclose” the list, in a message posted on the Facebook site for Afghans seeking sanctuary in the UK. He became known as the “anonymous user” in court documents. It took four days for Facebook to delete the names from the site, after a request by the government who warned that there was a threat.
Afghan leak debacle shows problem with ‘liberal imperialist itch’ of Blair/Cameron years, Tory Edward Leigh tells MPs
In the Commons Edward Leigh (Con), who as the longest-serving MP is father of the house, commended Healey for what he said. He went on:
What an appalling mess, but part of the original sin of us intervening militarily and then scuttling out. Can I take it, on a wider point, that we’ve learned our lesson now and we’ve got over the liberal imperialist itch of the Blair era and Cameron era to intervene militarily in ungovernable countries Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya. Let’s now just move on.
Healey says cost of relocating Afghans to UK as direct result of data breach will reach about £800m
Helen Maguire, the Lib Dem defence spokesperson, asked Healey about reports that it was estimated that the government might have to spend £7bn relocating Afghans affected by the leak.
Healey said the decision announced today, to close the ARR scheme, would save the MoD money.
He said the total cost of relocating people to the UK from Afghanistan, under all schemes, would be between £5.5bn and £6bn.
He said the cost of relocating people to the UK under the ARR scheme (ie, the people relocated as a direct result of the leak) was £400m. But he said that a similar amount would be spend relocating people who are due to come to the UK under that scheme, but who have not yet arrived.
That would take the total relocation costs arising from the leak to about £800m.
UPDATE: Healey said:
The estimated full costs of all Afghan schemes, that will run to their completion, from start to finish, because of the savings derived from the policy decisions we have taken today will be between £5.5bn and £6bn.
The cost of the ARR [Afghanistan Response Route] scheme to date, the cost and the sums committed to bring the 900 principals and their immediate families that are in Britain or in transit is around £400m, and I expect a similar sum to be the cost of those still to come.
In the Commons, asked for details of the person to blame for the leak, John Healey said it was a “defence official”. He said this was one of just several leaks happening from the MoD at the time.
Previous legal rulings relating to this case have now been published today, following the lifting of the superinjunction. You can read them all on the judiciary’s website.
Tories join Healey in offering apology to Afghans named in leak, and back government’s decision to close secret scheme
In the Commons James Cartlidge, the shadow defence secretary, responded to Healey. Cartlidge was a defence minister in the previous government and he joined Healey in offering an apology to Afghans named in the leak. He said:
The secretary of state has issued an apology on behalf of the government and I join him in that and in recognising that this data leak should never have happened and was an unacceptable breach of all relevant data protocols.
And I agree it is right that an apology is issued specifically to those whose data was compromised.
Cartlidge defended the previous government’s decision to respond to the leak by setting up a secret relocation scheme.
It is nevertheless a fact that cannot be ignored that, when this breach came to light, the immediate priority of the then-government was to avoid a very specific and terrible scenario, namely, 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.
As the Rimmer Review confirms that scenario, thankfully, appears to have been avoided.
Cartlidge also said the Tories backed closing the ARR scheme now.
Any threat picture is constantly evolving and, as I say, I support the secretary of state’s decision to review the MoD’s understanding of the threat.
And, given the latest situation as reported by Rimmer, we support his conclusion that the Afghanistan Response Route, the ARR, can now be closed.
Judge suggests he was surprised superinjunction held as long as it did
In his written ruling today Mr Justice Chamberlain suggested he was suprised that the superinjunction held foras long as it did. He said:
Those involved in this long-running and unprecedented case have known throughout that there would come a time when the superinjunction could no longer be maintained.
I decided that this point had been reached over a year ago. The Court of Appeal disagreed.
For the last year, my assumption has been that the injunction might fall to be discharged when the information protected by it leaked into the public domain through the media in the UK or abroad.
The parties have updated the court on a continual basis about the extent to which knowledge of the underlying matters has spread.
It is one of the many remarkable features of the litigation, and very much to the credit of the media organisations and individual journalists involved, that there has been no mention in the media of the underlying matters while the superinjunction remained in force.
Conclusions from Rimmer review into ongoing risks posed by Afghan data leak, and future of ARR scheme
Here are the key conclusions from the Paul Rimmer review about the ongoing risks posed by the original data leak, and the
-Appalling human rights abuses occur – including extra-judicial killings – against former officials. But there is also limited evidence to suggest that [certain individuals] have been targeted with any degree of consistency.
-Given the nearly four years since the Taleban takeover, posing a current threat or resistance to Taleban rule is likely to be a far more persuasive factor in the threat faced by individuals in Afghanistan, rather than former affiliations. As such, it appears unlikely that merely being on the dataset would be grounds for targeting. It is therefore also unlikely that family members – immediate or more distant – will be targeted simply because the “Principal” appears in the dataset.
-Should the Taleban wish to target individuals the wealth of data inherited from the former government would already enable them to do so. Additional data is always of interest to develop leads for investigative or targeting purposes. Publicity about the dataset’s loss would inevitably raise interest in acquiring it. But it is highly unlikely it would be the single, or definitive, piece of information enabling or prompting the Taleban to act. It is a “piece of a puzzle” rather than a “smoking gun”.
-No evidence points clearly to Taleban possession of the dataset. It is plausible the dataset (its actual content, rather than knowledge that a dataset exists) has not spread as widely or as rapidly as was initially feared.
-Given this context, the current ARR policy appears an extremely significant intervention, with not inconsiderable risk to HMG and the UK, to address the potentially limited net additional risk the incident likely presents. Based on the conclusions of this policy review, and the level of risk inherent within the current ARR policy, HMG could consider amending the approach to reflect the value the dataset offers. The Taleban already have access to significant volumes of data which enables them to identify personnel associated with the former government. The family and community based nature of Afghan society means former roles and associations are often already well known. The dataset is unlikely to significantly shift Taleban understanding of individuals who may be of interest to them. As a result, it is unlikely to profoundly change the existing risk profile of individuals named on the dataset.
This is what the judge, Mr Justice Chamberlain, said in his ruling today lifting the superinjunction.
[The superinjunction] was granted and continued because of the risk that, if the Taliban learned about the existence of the dataset, it is likely that they would be able to acquire it and would use it to identify those who had applied for relocation and target them for extra-judicial killing or severe physical ill-treatment.
The superinjunction is now being discharged following a review commissioned by the Ministry of Defence, which concludes that the Taliban likely already possess the key information in the dataset, that it is unlikely that individuals would be targeted simply because of their work for the UK or allied governments or for the former government of Afghanistan and that the acquisition of the dataset is accordingly unlikely substantially to raise the risk faced by the individuals whose data it includes.
Here is the press summary of the judgment today.
And here is the full judgment today, which includes the Paul Rimmer review of the ARR scheme.
