UK government auditor questions MoD disclosures of Afghan data leak

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The UK’s official government auditor has questioned the Ministry of Defence’s handling of a huge data leak that endangered thousands of Afghan nationals and was kept secret for two years.

The National Audit Office, an independent parliamentary body that scrutinises public spending, told the Financial Times that the MoD had not told it about the leak “in the established way for sensitive defence matters”.

Gareth Davies, comptroller and auditor general of the NAO, was now “considering the implications for the audit of the MoD’s accounts and the NAO’s value-for-money audit programme”, the body said.

“The MoD did not disclose this matter to the NAO in the established way for sensitive defence matters. The audit director for the MoD audit was briefed on a limited aspect (the fact of a data breach) and was not permitted to share that information within the NAO.”

The news comes a day after the High Court lifted a super-injunction that had banned the media from reporting that almost 24,000 Afghans affected by the breach had already been brought or will come to the UK. Officials said most would have been eligible to come to the UK in any event.

A British soldier in February 2022 accidentally leaked a database of applicants to a scheme for Afghans who had worked with the UK before the Taliban retook power in 2021. The leak was not discovered until August 2023 and soon after a super-injunction was imposed.

The MoD claimed it had reached an understanding with the NAO for a more “limited” description of the incident than usual to be included in the department’s accounts last year, according to court papers.

This was set to be a narrow “narrative” reference to the matter. But the department’s published report, released last July, omitted even the agreed formulation.

“Unfortunately, for reasons that are unclear to me, the narrative response was not provided and the [MoD annual] report itself did not replicate the agreed approach,” Dominic Wilson, a senior civil servant, told the High Court in January.

He said the proposed remedy for this “deficiency” was to provide a “footnote with additional context” in the department’s accounts this year.

An NAO official told the FT that the office “had no role in the decision on whether or not to disclose the incident”.

The MoD said it had “made all reasonable efforts to provide information to the NAO whilst complying with the terms of the super-injunction granted by the High Court.

“Now that the court order has been lifted, the MoD will work alongside the NAO to ensure that audits and annual accounts are accurate.” 

The previous Conservative government created a secret immigration scheme known as the Afghan Response Route to get people whose data had been leaked out of Afghanistan and into the UK.

The leaked database had the personal details of 25,000 people on it. UK officials have indicated that many had worked for the previous Afghanistan government but not directly with the UK.

The cost of the secret relocation plan as recently as February this year, under Sir Keir Starmer’s current Labour administration, was estimated at £7bn over several years, according to a government memo.

Defence secretary John Healey has said that the secret scheme would instead cost about £850mn over its lifetime because ministers were limiting the number of people who would be relocated.

“There is little or no evidence that there is a systematic retribution campaign going on [in Afghanistan],” he said.

The £850mn figure relates only to the cost of relocating people via the secret ARR scheme. There is also a cohort of at least 1,000 people who the government says arrived by the established public scheme but would have been ineligible if their data had not been leaked.

Healey has said about 7,000 people in total will come via the ARR. The larger 24,000 number includes Afghans coming through public relocation schemes.

He also said all of the people who had been relocated to Britain under the ARR scheme had been included in official migration data collected and published by the Home Office. Court papers show this only began in February this year.

Starmer on Wednesday criticised the Tories over the episode, telling MPs: “Ministers who served under the party opposite have serious questions to answer about how this was ever allowed to happen.”

Downing Street also said that Tory opposition leader Kemi Badenoch had declined a security briefing about the data leak earlier this year.

Badenoch’s spokesperson said she received many such offers and that this one had not been listed as ‘urgent’. They added that she was briefed on the matter on Monday when the issue was described as urgent.

Starmer was also not briefed on the issue when he was opposition leader. According to disclosures in court Healey, his then-shadow defence secretary, had declined an offer for Starmer to be briefed.

“The shadow defence secretary shared that he did not believe the leader of the opposition needed briefing at that time [December 2023] and would advise if this view changes at a later date,” MoD official Natalie Moore told the High Court in January 2024. Starmer was not subsequently briefed until he entered government 12 months ago, according to UK officials.

Ben Wallace, who was Conservative defence secretary at the time the data leak was discovered in 2023, earlier told the BBC: “I took a decision that the most important priority was to protect those people who could have been or were exposed by this data leak in Afghanistan, living among the Taliban.”

Wallace added that he took “complete responsibility” for the data leak as he was secretary of state at the time.