£10 BILLION and Counting – True Cost of the Afghan Leak Fiasco

 

BRUCE NEWSOME

THIS is how the British government treats military veterans:

Now we know, after the lifting of a superinjunction last week, that veterans were removed from housing to make room for Afghan migrants.

Thousands of British military veteran families are homeless, despite their entitlement to retain their military housing for some period of transition into civilian life.

Some of the migrants brought 22 relatives with them. The average number in a family group was five.

The migrants received 2,200 rooms (mostly hotel rooms), including 20 per cent of the MoD’s bedrooms. The government planned to grant them up to nine months in these rooms before finding them council houses or privately rented homes. In 2023, more than 1.3million British persons were waiting for social housing. Tens of thousands of Afghans have got ahead of them.

Soon the total number of Afghans resettled in Britain as former allies and collaborators will surpass 40,000 (excluding countless more illegal arrivals who are not vetted at all).

The cost to exfiltrate and house the official migrants has surpassed £7billion. That is 14 times the savings the government made by cutting active military personnel. The cost is likely to go up, given a class action lawsuit and various poorly estimated services.

Here’s the sad story of government incompetence and secrecy, so far as we know it to date; I expect more scandalous details to be leaked soon. And I expect the costs to go up.

In February 2022, the personal details of nearly 19,000 Afghan applicants for resettlement were leaked accidentally by an employee at the MoD. Counting family members, the MoD feared that 100,000 Afghans were affected.

The applications had built up since August 2021 when the Taliban returned to power during a rushed and chaotic withdrawal by foreign forces, triggered by a unilateral decision by the Joe Biden administration to complete the withdrawal within the calendar month.

The UK government initiated the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP). The claimants were supposed to prove a fear of reprisals from the Taliban due to their previous co-operation with UK forces. Successful applicants would be entitled to resettlement in the UK and indefinite right to remain.

The claimants’ identifying information was leaked accidentally, the government says. A military person working at the MoD was part of an 80-person team trying to identify genuine at-risk Afghan personnel. That person accidentally attached to an email a spreadsheet containing the details of 19,000 Afghan claimants, plus more than 100 British special operators and spies, and sent it to external recipients.

The Conservative government learned of the breach in August 2023, when some of the details appeared in a Facebook group. A claimant was planning to blackmail the government by posting dozens of names from the spreadsheet.

A new resettlement scheme, the Afghan Response Route (ARR) for those on the leaked list was set up in April 2024, before the hapless Conservatives lost the general election in July.

In October 2024, the new Labour government’s Secretary of State for Defence, John Healey, proposed to merge the two resettlement schemes as the Afghan Resettlement Programme (ARP). It aimed to accept around 36,000 people, including 28,500 affected by the data leak, at a cost of £7.23billion.

In fact, the government was adding people it could not verify. In February 2025, in court, the government said it could not verify the numbers or the risks for fear of further spreading personal identifying information.

But already an internal review had concluded that the Taliban already knew the claimants after capturing official documents, and that the Taliban had punished few former regime supporters. The MoD told the court it was ending the emergency resettlement scheme, and recommended the injunction be discharged. However, it needed to time to inform the affected persons of the breaches to their privacy. (Really? After three years?)

So the superinjunction (which prevents anyone even revealing the injunction) remained in place until mid-July.

On July 1, the government had stopped all applications under immigration rule changes laid down in parliament. Journalists reported the stoppages, but were not allowed to explain why.

The total arrivals under the secret resettlement route alone have been reported at between 4,500 and 18,500, with thousands more to come. Why the discrepancy? Different journalists have different contacts, and these contacts are clearly not singing from the same hymn sheet. I suspect the MoD itself still doesn’t know how many will come. Perhaps it isn’t even sure how many have already arrived!

As of June, the number of people the ARP aimed to resettle had increased to 42,572. Given the MoD’s estimate in February of the cost to resettle 36,000, we should expect the cost to reach £9.15billion.

Most of the applicants, including most of those affected by the data breach, remain in Afghanistan. That’s tens of thousands of direct applicants, and perhaps 100,000 family members.

The government had planned to compensate any legitimate claimants who could not be resettled. That plan is part of the scheme now closed, but I bet human rights lawyers are rubbing their hands at the opportunity to challenge that U-turn.

The government had planned to compensate anybody affected by the data breach. It now says it will not, but that’s not credible. In September 2021, the MoD leaked the personal data for 265 Afghans, also through emails from the government to non-government addresses. Just this month, the government announced £1.6million in compensation. At that rate, the leak of 2022 would cost the government nearly £115million.

Additionally, in February the government secretly committed to an ongoing service to inform victims of the effects of the data breach. This will cost £360,000 per month, excluding a call centre costing £60,000 per month. So let’s say at least £5million per year. For how many years? Who knows? Since a service of this scale has never been executed by the government before, the estimate could be badly off – and we know how the MoD tends to under-estimate the costs of its programmes.

The government must set aside millions of pounds just to defend against litigation for compensation under the Data Protection Act 2018. The class action was indicated to the government in February, but couldn’t be reported at the time! The lead lawyer himself estimates the eventual cost to the government of the compensation as £250million, excluding legal fees and punitive damages.

So we can expect the total cost to the MoD of its Afghan resettlement debacle to reach closer to £10billion. Even this excludes the unprogrammed costs to the MoD of servicing the debacle: the salaries of the lawyers involved in the superinjunction, for instance.

The MoD’s bill excludes the cost to local councils, the NHS and other civilian providers in servicing the lucky migrants after the MoD passes them on.

And these direct costs exclude the opportunity costs. How could £10billion have been better spent?

---

This article (£10bn and counting – true cost of the Afghan leak fiasco) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Bruce Newsome