Thousands of people are being relocated to the UK as part of a secret £850 million scheme set up after a personal data leak of Afghans who supported British forces.
A dataset containing the personal information of nearly 19,000 people who applied for the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (Arap) was released "in error" in February 2022 by a defence official.
The breach resulted in the creation of a secret Afghan relocation scheme – the Afghanistan Response Route – in April 2024.
The scheme is understood to have cost around £400 million so far, with a projected cost once completed of around £850 million.
Millions more is expected to be paid in legal costs and compensation.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) became aware of the breach over a year after the release, when excerpts of the dataset were anonymously posted onto a Facebook group in August 2023.
An unprecedented superinjunction prevented the media, Parliament and public from finding out about this data breach for more than 600 days.
That court order was lifted at the High Court on Tuesday.
Details on the dataset include the the names and contact details of the Arap applicants and names of their family members.
It is understood that the unnamed official had emailed the dataset outside of a secure government system while attempting to verify information, believing the dataset to only have around 150 rows.
However, there were more than 33,000 rows of information which were inadvertently sent.
In total, between 80,000 and 100,000 people, including the estimated number of family members of the Arap applicants, were affected by the breach and could be at risk of harassment, torture or death if the Taliban obtained their data, judges said in June 2024.
Around 4,500 people – made up of 900 Arap applicants and approximately 3,600 family members have been brought to the UK or are in transit so far through the Afghanistan Response Route.
A further estimated 600 people and their relatives are expected to be relocated before the scheme closes, with a total of around 6,900 people expected to be relocated by the end of the scheme.
An unprecedented superinjunction was made at the High Court in September 2023 to reduce the risk of alerting the Taliban to the existence of the data, with the decision to apply for an order made by the Conservative’s then-Defence Secretary Ben Wallace.
The Information Commissioner’s Office and Metropolitan Police were also informed.
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