The Ministry of Defence has gone to Parliament seeking £2.5 billion to account for Afghan asylum programmes it actively concealed from public view, in a development that exposes the full financial consequences of a data breach cover-up spanning multiple governments.
The funds relate to two schemes — the Afghanistan Response Route (ARR), created to protect Afghans whose details were compromised in an MoD data breach, and the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (Arap), which has handled the bulk of Afghan asylum cases since 2021.
The department reportedly conceded it had previously "withheld" the expenditure from oversight and was now correcting the record.
The crisis traces back to a junior Special Boat Service officer who mistakenly fired off a spreadsheet to his Afghan contacts listing the personal details of tens of thousands of Afghans who had sought relocation to Britain. The document fell into Taliban hands and also exposed the identities of more than 100 British intelligence officers and Special Forces personnel — earning it the unofficial designation of the most expensive email in history.
The Government's response was to pursue an unprecedented High Court super-injunction, gagging the press from covering the issue entirely. Reporters were put on notice that prison sentences awaited anyone who defied it.
The injunction was eventually lifted by Mr Justice Chamberlain, who pulled no punches in his assessment. He said in court: "How feasible [is it] to spend that amount of money without the facts coming to light? But we are now saying how it was feasible: making a statement that provides cover and agree a narrative which is not a true narrative, or not a full narrative."
His conclusion was that ministers had deceived both Parliament and the country.
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Governments of both parties had privately sanctioned up to £7billion to bring tens of thousands of Afghan nationals to Britain — a figure kept entirely off the public radar. When Chancellor Rachel Reeves pointed to a fiscal "black hole" after Labour's 2024 election win, that hidden sum was a considerable part of what she was referring to, reports The Telegraph.
Former Conservative defence minister Johnny Mercer is reported ot have said: "It's heartbreaking that we can spend so much money and yet still let down so many people."
Referring to British-sponsored Afghan military units, he added as per the report: "We still haven't repatriated all those who served in TF333 and TF444, who are entitled to be in the United Kingdom."
Treasury documents released this week put the figure at £2,564,517,000. The MoD characterised the request as a bookkeeping correction tied to "a prior year adjustment within the 2024–25 financial statements" rather than money being drawn from current or future defence budgets. Less than half — approximately £1.25 billion — is directly attributable to Arap and ARR.
Officials were reported to have admitted: "The adjustment was necessary to take into account new information that the Department withheld from the National Audit Office during the audit of the 2023–24 financial statements. The Department did not allow for the impact of this adjustment in either its Main or Supplementary Estimates."
The MoD press office declined to itemise the remaining expenditure or account for why the historically transparent costs of Arap had been pulled into the adjustment, the Express understands.
An MoD spokesman reportedly said: "We've fully laid out the estimated costs of the schemes under the Afghan Resettlement Programme, which are expected to be between £5.5-6bn as the schemes complete. Within those figures, it's estimated that costs Afghan Response Route, which relates to the data breach, may be up to £850m. This adjustment reflects a change to an accounting provision for liability in a previous year's financial statements. It is not additional cash or in‑year spending incurred by the department."
