Hundreds of millions of pounds have been spent on a secret scheme to relocate Afghan victims of a data leak to the UK, it can be revealed.
Around 19,000 Afghan nationals who helped support British forces had their personal details revealed when a dataset was released ‘in error’ in February 2022.
More than two years later – three months before the 2024 election – a secret relocation scheme called the Afghanistan Response Route was set up.
It is understood this programme has cost around £400 million so far, and is projected to cost around £850 million once completed.
Additional legal costs and compensation are expected to add millions more to the total bill.
It took more than a year for the Ministry of Defence to become aware of the data breach, which was the result of an apparent mistake by a defence official.
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The extent of the issue was discovered when excerpts from the dataset were posted to a Facebook group in August 2023.
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