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Conservative former ministers have “serious questions to answer” over the secret scheme to resettle Afghan nationals named in a data breach under the previous government, Keir Starmer has said.
In his first comment on the subject since news of the £850m programme emerged after an unprecedented superinjunction blocking discussion about it was lifted on Tuesday, the prime minister welcomed a planned inquiry into what happened led by the Commons defence committee.
“There has always been support across this house for the United Kingdom fulfilling our obligations to Afghans who served alongside British forces,” Starmer said at the start of prime minister’s questions.
“We warned in opposition about Conservative management of this policy, and yesterday, the defence secretary set out the full extent of the failings that we inherited: a major data breach, a superinjunction, a secret route that has already cost hundreds of millions of pounds.”
He added: “Ministers who served under the party opposite have serious questions to answer about how this was ever allowed to happen. The chair of the defence committee has indicated that he intends to hold further inquiries. I welcome that and hope that those who were in office at the time will welcome that scrutiny.”
Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, did not mention the Afghan scheme at prime minister’s questions, instead focusing her questions on the economy.
News about the previously secret Afghanistan Response Route (ARR) emerged after a high court judge said the superinjuction had the effect of concealing discussions about spending “the sort of money which makes a material difference to government spending plans and is normally the stuff of political debate”.
The 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, potentially putting them at risk of reprisals from the Taliban.
Ministers and officials at the Ministry of Defence learned of the breach in August 2023 after data was posted to a Facebook group, and applied to the high court for an injunction, the first sought by a British government – to prevent any further media disclosure.
Setting out the details of the scheme to the Commons on Tuesday, John Healey, the defence secretary, said Labour would halt the ARR, which will cost a total of £850m and will help an estimated 6,900 people.
The decision to end the scheme came after a review into the repercussions of the data leak, led by Paul Rimmer, a retired civil servant, said that the acquisition of the data by the Taliban was “unlikely to substantially change an individual’s existing exposure given the volume of data already available”. It was unlikely, Rimmer said, that “merely being on the dataset would be grounds for targeting”.
