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The former defence secretary Grant Shapps has defended the use of an unprecedented superinjunction to suppress a data breach that led to the UK government relocating 15,000 Afghans.
The Afghanistan Response Route (ARR) was created in haste after it emerged that personal information about 18,700 Afghans who had applied to come to the UK had been leaked in error by a British defence official in early 2022.
It has also emerged that details of members of the SAS and MI6 were among more than 100 Britons named in the database.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Shapps, who was defence secretary from 31 August 2023 to 5 July 2024, said his focus after the leak was on “sorting out the mess and saving lives”.
The former minister, who was in post while the superinjunction was imposed on the incident, suggested he believed it should remain in place because he thought there was a risk of those named being murdered if it did not. The superinjunction lapsed on Tuesday, when a high court judge concluded the threat to the 18,700 Afghans was no longer very significant.
He told the programme: “My focus was on two things … one, sorting out the mess and saving lives, and two, making sure that systems were in place which frankly should have always been in place to make sure this sort of sensitive information could never be sent on.
“There were British Special Forces and secret services on that list. It seemed to me that if there was any doubt at all, that erring on the side of extreme caution, a superinjunction meant that that was entirely justified.”
He added: “Faced with the choice of whether that list would get out and people would be pursued, murdered and executed as a result of it, or doing something to try and save those lives, I’d much rather now be in this interview explaining why a superinjunction was required, than being in this interview explaining why I failed to act and people were murdered.”
Parliament’s intelligence and security committee, which monitors the UK spy agencies, said it would scrutinise what had happened after an inquiry announced by the Commons defence select committee.
The ISC asked that all intelligence assessments that had been shared with high court in secret now be shared with the committee. Its chair, Lord Beamish, asked why “material relating to the data loss” could not be shared with the committee early given that it routinely reviews classified material.
In a statement on Tuesday, after the superinjunction was lifted, the defence secretary, John Healey, offered a “sincere apology” on behalf of the government for the data breach.
