Revealed: 24,000 Afghans offered asylum in UK after data breach
The leak, which can be reported following the lifting of a superinjunction, has pushed the cost of bringing Afghan refugees to Britain to as much as £6 billion, the MoD has admitted, threatening to open up a new black hole in the nation's finances.
The revelation is set to overshadow Rachel Reeves's Mansion House speech on Tuesday night, at a time when the Chancellor is already considering raising taxes in the autumn to balance the books.
It is not known whether the huge cost to the taxpayer of resettling Afghans has been factored into the Government's budget or whether taxes might have been raised to pay for it, as the secrecy around the data breach has prevented proper scrutiny.
The breach occurred in February 2022, when a Royal Marine sent an email to a group of Afghans and accidentally included a spreadsheet containing the identities of 25,000 Afghans who were applying for asylum - soldiers who had worked with the British Army and their family members.
It came to light a year later when an anonymous Facebook user posted extracts of the data. The posts were deleted within three days after MoD officials contacted Meta, Facebook's owner, but the Government decided it had no choice but to offer asylum to Afghans affected because they were at risk of reprisal attacks from the Taliban.
A number of former Afghan special forces personnel have been murdered by the Taliban since it regained power in Afghanistan in 2021.
Some of those who will now come to Britain had asylum applications rejected previously, only for officials to be forced into a reversal.
The number expected to be brought to Britain as a result of the breach was initially stated in court documents to be nearly 43,000 people.
However, John Healey, the Defence Secretary, will tell Parliament on Tuesday that just 6,900 Afghans will be brought to Britain as a direct result of the breach, under a scheme set up specifically to deal with the fallout.
According to the MoD, of these, 4,500 are already in the country or are in transit, and 2,400 more are yet to travel.
Officials said that a further 17,000 Afghans deemed eligible to come to Britain under a separate relocation scheme were also found to have been affected by the breach. Of these, 14,000 are already in the country or are in transit, and 3,000 more are yet to travel.
In total, it is believed that between 80,000 and 100,000 people were affected by the data breach, the Court of Appeal has said.
The Government has fought a two-year legal battle to keep the leak a secret, including securing a superinjunction which has until now prevented this newspaper and other media organisations from not only reporting the data breach, but the very existence of the legal battle.
The superinjunction was lifted at midday on Tuesday by the High Court.
It is the most serious data breach in British history, dwarfing previous episodes such as the 2013 Snowden leaks detailing GCHQ's secret surveillance methods used against millions of internet users.
The database also included the details of British government officials, The Telegraph understands.
Both the Speakers of the House of Commons and the House of Lords were informed of the leak in September 2023 'so that they could make informed decisions as to how matters should be handled in Parliament'. MPs have been unable to ask questions about the leak owing to the super injunction.
The Afghan soldiers named in the data breach
After Britain joined the US-led coalition that invaded Afghanistan in 2001, it trained, equipped and funded military units formed of Afghan volunteers who took part in joint operations to disrupt the country's drug trade by capturing and, where necessary, killing key Taliban figures.
The two UK-trained and funded Afghan units - ATF444 and CF333 - that worked alongside the SAS and SBS in some of those secret operations were nicknamed the Triples.
By the time of the British withdrawal from Kabul in August 2021, CF333 'was the last formed unit of Afghan soldiers' still loyal to the deposed Western-backed government, according to the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) defence think-tank.
Former members of the Triples are among those likely to have been identified in the leaked database.
The personnel identified in the data breach are now mostly believed to be safe, according to internal Ministry of Defence assessments. However, there have been several reports of Taliban hitmen murdering Afghans they view as Western collaborators, along with their families. These include former members of the Triples.
One murdered Triple member, Riaz Ahmedzai, who was gunned down in Jalalabad in April 2023, although it is not known if he was in the leaked spreadsheet.
The leak, the superinjunction and the cost
The Royal Marine responsible for the data breach is understood to have accidentally shared the spreadsheet on two occasions in February 2022.
The spreadsheet included the names, contact details and personal information of Afghans applying to the Government's Afghan Relocation and Assistance Policy (Arap), which aimed to resettle Afghans who worked with the British and were, along with their families, at risk of Taliban reprisals. It also included information about Afghans who applied to a similar programme called the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme.
Sources told the Telegraph that the leaker - who has not been identified - had been instructed to check with trusted Afghans that others applying to Arap had genuinely been part of units that fought alongside British forces.
The MoD only became aware of the leak when in August 2023 a member of the public wrote to Luke Pollard, the Labour MP for Plymouth, and James Heappey, a Conservative who was at the time a defence minister, warning them that the spreadsheet had been shared widely online.
'I have a copy of it, so does the Taliban - why doesn't the ARAP team?' wrote the person, whose name was redacted in court documents, in the email dated August 10, 2023. They are understood to be a support worker for Afghans settling in the UK.
Extracts from the spreadsheet were posted on Facebook four days later.
Officials scrambled into action. Meta was contacted and the posts removed, and a message was sent to around 1,800 people who had applied to Arap warning them of a 'potential data breach of your contact information'.
The message said: 'To protect you, do not respond to emails or WhatsApp/text messages from people stating they are from UK Government departments.'
Some of those affected told the British Council they had been contacted by Iranian phone numbers on WhatsApp asking them to disclose scans of their passports.
By August 2023, journalists had become aware of the leak, prompting the MoD to apply for an emergency superinjunction to prevent any reporting on it.
Dozens of court hearings have since taken place, including a referral to the Court of Appeal when Mr Justice Chamberlain, a High Court judge, made an initial attempt to lift the superinjunction last year.
The estimated cost to the taxpayer of resettling Afghans - between £5.5 billion and £6 billion - has come from the Treasury reserve.
The Government originally set aside £7 billion, MoD lawyers told the High Court, but ministers expect to save around £1.2 billion after closing all Afghan asylum schemes this month. The scheme set up as a result of the leak - the Afghanistan Response Route (ARR) - will be closed on Tuesday.
It is understood that the direct costs of the leak to date have been £400 million and that £850 million has been set aside to complete the resettlement of Afghans affected by the data breach. It is not believed that this includes any potential compensation costs.
Earlier this month, following a separate data breach connected to Afghans applying for asylum, the MoD agreed to pay £1.6 million to the 265 people affected. The government was also issued with a £350,000 fine.
A law firm, Barings, has around 1,000 Afghan ex-soldiers signed up to a mass data breach claim against the MoD in relation to the new leak. That number is likely to increase. Lawyers believe each individual could receive up to £50,000 or more in compensation.
Headache for Reeves
The huge cost of the resettlement of Afghan refugees is an additional headache for the Chancellor.
Economists have warned that the £9.9 billion headroom Ms Reeves has to balance the books has already been wiped out, making tax rises seemingly inevitable, and the Government is also grappling with voter backlash over the cost of housing asylum seekers, which has risen to £4 million a day.
It emerged in May that the estimated cost of hotels and other accommodation for asylum seekers had risen from £4.5 billion between 2019 and 2029 to £15.3 billion. It is not known whether any of the rise in cost can be partly explained by the data breach.
Labour insiders believe the spiralling asylum bill is fuelling support for Reform, while Sir Keir Starmer has pledged to end the use of hotels to house asylum seekers by 2029.
As a result of the data breach, officials secured '1,400 bedspaces' in hotels 'in West Sussex' according to a ministerial briefing document seen by The Telegraph, and similar accommodation in Preston, Aberdeen and Cardiff.
Moving a total of 650 Afghans into the Yorkshire and Humber area will cost £18 million, or just under £27,700 per asylum seeker, by the end of 2025, the document also states.
Chaos in Afghanistan and the migration crisis
When Western militaries pulled out of Afghanistan in August 2021, the Taliban regained control.
The Arap scheme was set up to bring Afghans who worked for or with the British Government and were at risk from the regime to safety.
A separate scheme called the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme (ACRS) was also set up, for applications from Afghans considered especially vulnerable - such as women and girls - and others who assisted British efforts.
When it was set up in 2022, the Conservative government promised ACRS would resettle up to 20,000 people 'over the coming years'.
The most recent MoD figures show that the number of Afghans offered asylum, including those affected by the data breach, is 39,200. A further 16,900 are expected to come to the country.
It was announced on July 1, without notice, that the Arap scheme was closed to new applicants.
The Home Office said the Defence Secretary 'now considers the Arap to have fulfilled its original purpose and can be closed to new principal applications, not least so that defence efforts and resources can be focused where they are most needed - on our nation's security, to combat the acute threats and destabilising behaviour of our adversaries.'
A Home Office paper announcing the decision said Arap's closure to new applications was the first step to completing Afghan resettlement, and the Government aims to have 'successfully honoured its obligation' to complete resettlements by the end of this parliament.
Applications made under Arap before the closure will still be considered, the Home Office document added. It stated that the Ministry of Defence had a backlog of 22,000 decisions from the scheme.
It is believed that the scheme was closed ahead of the lifting of the superinjunction so that there could not be a rush of further applicants once news of the data breach became public.
A Home Office source insisted that they did not expect the closure of the scheme to lead to an increase in Afghans trying to reach the UK illegally.
They attributed this partly to the fact that a significant number of Afghans are already crossing the Channel in small boats. They were the most common nationality arriving in small boats in the year to March 2025 - 5,800, 16 per cent of small boat arrivals - although this was down from the peak of 9,100 arrivals in 2022.
The situation for those Afghans who previously worked alongside the British military and still live in the region is deteriorating.
Pakistan, where a large number of Afghans fled when the Taliban re-asserted control over their home country, has been 'steadily hardening its position towards Afghan refugees' since December last year, according to MoD court filings.
British diplomats have been trying to stop Afghans being 'forcibly deported' from Pakistan back to Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, Iran has sent around 1.2 million Afghan refugees back to their home country, according to United Nations figures released at the end of June, following a pledge in March to deport two million in total. The MoD said that at least two ex-Triples are known to be among that number.
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