Wednesday, July 16, 2025
Extraordinary cover-up of leak that could have cost lives
They add that fears that the individuals named would be at risk from reprisals from the Taliban led the previous government to set up a secret relocation scheme, the Afghan Response Route (ARR), involving 20,000 people at a cost in the order of £2bn.
But the most astonishing thing about this whole story are the lengths that the government went to in an effort to cover up this whole mess, involving securing an unprecedented superinjunction in August 2023 preventing the leak and secret relocation scheme to be reported and denying those in the know to even disclose the existence of the court order:
“Members of this house, including you, Mr Speaker, and myself, have been subject to this superinjunction. It is unprecedented, and to be clear, the court has always recognised the parliamentary privilege of proceedings in this house, and ministers decided not to tell parliamentarians at an earlier stage about the data incident as the widespread publicity would increase the risk of the Taliban obtaining the dataset.”
Healey said the leaked spreadsheet also included details of MPs, senior military officers and government officials.
He said: “This official mistakenly believed that they were sending the names of 150 applicants. However, the spreadsheet in fact contained personal information associated to 18,714 Afghans who had applied either to the ex gratia or the Arap [Afghan relocations and assistance policy] scheme on or before the 7th of January 2022.
“It contained names and contact details of applicants and in some instances information relating to applicants’ family members. And, in a small number of cases, the names of members of parliament, senior military officers and government officials who were noted as supporting the application. This was a serious departmental error.”
He added: “To date, 900 ARR principals are in Britain or in transit, together with 3,600 family members, at a cost of around £400m.”
The safety of the individuals was of course paramount, but as Lewis Goodall of The Newsagents podcast reports, the government did not swing into action as one might expect to get these Afghans out of danger. Instead, they effectively sat on their hands:
Months went by, yet we heard nothing. To my surprise, given that by now I was aware the breach had taken place in early 2022 and had been discussed openly in an Afghan Facebook forum, there wasn’t any wider reporting in the media. Eventually, we were summoned to another hearing, where I expected news that the super would be discharged, or at the very least a date where that would happen. To my astonishment, there was no prospect of this- instead the government was changing the rules of the game. It became clear, via the court documents that initially at least, the then Sunak government was not proposing to help very many people as a result of the breach at all- around 200 principals, perhaps up to 1000 in all including family members- 1% of the total number potentially affected and at at least some risk.
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The government has spent a huge amount of money on this case. Defending its right to secrecy over our right to know, cloaked under Afghans right to life, but not to know. I worry about where this leaves our democracy, I worry about what precedent it sets, I worry about how easy it is in our system, for the executive to act without restraint. For all of its problems, this could never have happened in the United States, with its first amendment rights, and constitutionally bound freedom of expression. So many times I sat in court 27 and wondered- what else don’t we know? Might there be other courts like this, in other cases? In my view, there never ever should. This case, is about a question as old as politics itself- who guards the guardians?
He has a valid point.
