Healey apologises after gagging order lifted, revealing how Afghans' details were leaked

Defence Secretary John Healey has offered an apology on behalf of the Government for a data breach that saw the details of people who supported British forces in Afghanistan leaked by mistake.

Details on the dataset include the names and contact details of more than 18,000 applicants to the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy, also known as Arap.

Thousands of Afghans are being relocated to the UK after a secret scheme was set up in the wake of the leak.

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The Arap scheme was responsible for relocating Afghan nationals who had worked for or with the UK Government and were therefore at risk of reprisals once the Taliban returned to power in Kabul in 2021.

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.

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.

Data containing the personal information of nearly 19,000 people who applied to the Arap scheme was released in error in February 2022 by a defence official.

The Ministry of Defence only 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.

The breach resulted in the creation of a secret Afghan relocation scheme – the Afghanistan Response Route – in April 2024, details of which have only just emerged.

The scheme is understood to have cost around £400m so far, with a projected cost, once completed, of around £850m, but millions more is expected to be paid in legal costs and compensation.

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 then-defence secretary Ben Wallace.

The Information Commissioner’s Office and Metropolitan Police were also informed.

The superinjunction, which has now been lifted, is thought to be the longest lasting order of its kind and the first time the Government has sought such a restrictive measure against the media.