Ministers must urgently clarify the costs of the UK’s secret resettlement programme for thousands of Afghan nationals following a disastrous data leak, the head of parliament’s spending watchdog has said.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, head of the House of Commons public accounts committee, told the Financial Times on Wednesday there is “confusion” over the costs of the policy, which was kept secret until this week.
He said he was “concerned about the cost,” after the courts and parliament heard seemingly different cost estimates for the government’s response to the data breach, ranging from around £850mn to upwards of £7bn.
A forecast of £7bn for the Afghan relocations resulting from the data breach was referred to on several occasions during “super-injunction” proceedings that gagged the press before the restrictions were lifted on Tuesday.
Mr Justice Chamberlain, the judge who has presided over the superinjunction case since 2023 and lifted the gag order, said last week in a private hearing that the public would want to know “what categories of information is on it [the database], what was it that caused the government to decide to spend £7bn or whatever it is”.
He added: “People will want to judge for themselves the reaction to it — both the government’s and the courts’, and how everything was justified.”
Chamberlain also referred at earlier stages of the proceedings to the costs arising from the data breach running into the billions, an assertion that was unchallenged by government lawyers.
“It is fundamentally objectionable for decisions that affect the lives and safety of thousands of human beings, and involve the commitment of billions of pounds of public money, to be taken in circumstances where they are completely insulated from public debate,” he said in a private ruling last year.
On Tuesday the Ministry of Defence insisted the bill for the secret relocations scheme set up as a result of the leak was just £850mn, after it changed its policy to limit the numbers.
Jeff King, law professor at University College London, said: “It was uncontroversial in the various judgments of Mr Justice Chamberlain that the sums at issue in this case could run into ‘several billion pounds’.”
He added: “The Government must offer a forensic explanation for why present estimates are out of line with previous ones, if the Commons or the public are to hold the Government and both parties to account for his debacle.”
A government memo written in February to initiate a review of the response to the data leak, and submitted as evidence to the court, stated: “The current policy response to the [data] incident will mean relocating c25,000 Afghans, who have previously been found ineligible for the [Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy] scheme . . . This will extend the scheme for another 5 years at a cost of c.£7bn.” The figure equates to £280,000 per person.
A senior MoD official told the court in March 2024 that the cost of housing a resettled Afghan for three years ranged from £150,000 in a social housing company property to £250,000 in a hotel — although ministers now say they are only paying for nine months of accommodation.
On Tuesday defence secretary John Healey insisted in the House of Commons that the £7bn figure was a “previous estimate” of the “total cost of all government Afghan schemes for the entire period in which they may operate” — not the projected cost of relocations directly resulting from the data breach.
The updated cost for all relocation programmes has been revised down to £5.5bn — £6bn, he added.
Clifton-Brown said: “I am concerned about aspects of the superinjunction and the length of time that it was applied. I’m also concerned about the cost.”
He added: “Figures of £800mn-plus have been given by the secretary of state, but there still seems to be confusion of where the much higher figure of £7bn, used in the court case, relates to.”
The public accounts committee has made preliminary arrangements to summon MoD officials “to come and explain all of this in a public session in the autumn”, the senior Tory MP said.
Other elements surrounding the financial cost of the data breach remain hazy.
This week the MoD has striven to distinguish between two numbers: the 24,000 Afghans affected by the data breach who have been, or will be, resettled in Britain, and the proportion of this tally whose resettlement is solely as a result of the data breach, which it claims is about 7,900 people.
However, the MoD has not offered detailed costings for the latter group. It maintains the secret immigration route created in response to the breach has a lifetime cost of about £850mn, accounting for the resettlement of 6,900 Afghans.
Officials have not specified what the overall timeframe of this scheme will be, though. Nor has the MoD given costings for the relocation of at least 1,000 Afghans who came to the UK under a separate public resettlement scheme, who qualified only as a result of the data breach.
The Conservative party, which was in office at the time of the leak, was caught up in a blame game on Wednesday.
Former Tory prime minister Liz Truss said on X: “I am shocked by the secrecy and cover-up over the admission of thousands of Afghans to Britain at the cost of £7bn to the taxpayer. A decision that was in itself wrong.”
Sir Ben Wallace, former Tory defence secretary when the leak was discovered in August 2023, retorted on the site that Truss was “part of the Cabinet that approved the relocation of the ARAP Afghans and the wider Home Office refugee scheme”.
In a message to Truss, he added: “The £7bn is the total cost of the total scheme. Not the ones involved in the leak. I’m ‘shocked’ you cant remember your own role . . . ”
Tan Dhesi, chair of the Commons defence committee, said the cost of the blunder could rise to more than £1bn. “This email could be one of the most costly email blunders in history,” he told the BBC.
An MoD official said £7bn was an “incorrect figure”, adding: “Through the decisions our government has taken, we expect to make £1.2bn in savings and bring 9,500 fewer people to the UK.”
Alex Thomas, programme director of the Institute for Government, said: “It’s important that there’s clarity for parliament, the public more generally and the courts about what the cost estimates actually are.”
