‘Treason’: UK’s secret plan to resettle thousands of Afghans revealed after ‘super-injunction’ lifted
The UK has been rocked by a “shocking” scandal after it was revealed the government launched a $14 billion secret resettlement plan for thousands of Afghans.
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The UK has been rocked by a “shocking” scandal after it was revealed the former government launched a $14 billion secret resettlement plan for thousands of Afghans, including some previously rejected for asylum due to sexual assaults.
Ministers in the UK’s last Conservative government have “serious questions to answer” over the resettlement plan for the Afghans, launched after a data breach allegedly endangered their lives, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Wednesday.
Parliamentary Speaker Lindsay Hoyle said the affair “raised significant constitutional issues” after it emerged that the previous government had obtained a “super-injunction” court order banning media coverage and preventing any scrutiny by parliament.
Thousands of Afghans who worked with the UK and their families have been brought to Britain under the program following the leak.
But the 2022 breach and the resettlement plan — which the former government earmarked at an estimated cost of £7 billion ($14.4 billion) over five years — to protect those involved from potential repercussions only came to light on Tuesday after a court super-gag was lifted.
According to The Telegraph, some of those offered asylum previously had their applications rejected, including for violent or sexual assaults.
Defence Minister John Healey told parliament a UK official had accidentally leaked a spreadsheet containing the names and details of almost 19,000 Afghans who had asked to be relocated to Britain.
“This was a serious departmental error,” Mr Healey said, adding, “Lives may have been at stake.”
It happened in February 2022, just six months after Taliban fighters seized Kabul, he said.
In parliament Wednesday, Mr Starmer said his government supported the principle of fulfilling “our obligations to Afghans who served alongside British forces” in the post 9/11 conflict in the South Asian country.
Mr Healey had “set out the full extent of the failings that we inherited: a major data breach, a super-injunction, a secret route that has already cost hundreds of millions of pounds”, he added.
“Ministers who served under the party opposite have serious questions to answer about how this was ever allowed to happen,” he said.
Kept from parliament
The nearly two-year-long court ban secured by the previous government prevented any media reporting of the leak.
In addition, parliament was not briefed and there was no public knowledge of the resettlement plan and the costs involved.
Mr Hoyle, who is responsible for the proper administration of the House of Commons, also commented on the affair.
“This episode raises significant constitutional issues,” he said. “I have therefore asked the clerks to consider whether any lessons need to be learned from this case.”
Under the Conservatives the secret program was put in place in April 2024 to help those “judged to be at the highest risk of reprisals by the Taliban”, Mr Healey told parliament.
Some 900 Afghans and 3600 family members have now been brought to Britain or are in transit under the program known as the Afghan Response Route, at a cost of around £400 million ($822 million).
Applications from 600 more people have also been accepted, bringing the estimated total cost of the scheme to £850 million ($1.75 billion).
They are among some 36,000 Afghans accepted by Britain under different schemes since the August 2021 fall of Kabul.
In a closed-door hearing on November 11, lawyers for the Ministry of Defence discussed a plan to “provide cover” for the unexpected numbers of Afghans arriving in Britain, The Times reported.
Unprecedented gag order
The revelation of the unprecedented and draconian gag order has reignited debate over their use in the UK.
Super-injunctions are a controversial legal tool mainly used by celebrities to stop reporting on their private lives — most famously former Manchester United footballer Ryan Giggs, who sought one in 2011 to prevent an affair being exposed.
In place for 683 days, it was the longest super-injunction ever deployed and the first to be used by the government.
The injunction “contra mundum” — Latin for “against the world” — was only lifted after a two-year legal battle led The Times and other media organisations.
“Its gagging power was so wide-ranging that journalists were prevented from asking basic questions about how the leak happened, who knew what when and who should be held to account,” the newspaper wrote.
“Parliament was misled and important scrutiny of a multi-billion-pound operation to handle the fallout and rescue potentially endangered Afghans was impossible.”
‘Treason’
In a scathing op-ed for The Telegraph, Richard Tice, deputy leader of the Reform UK party, said the “shocking” scandal bordered on “treason”.
“With no vetting procedure in place, we are letting in sex offenders, potential terrorists and criminals,” he wrote.
“It really does beg the question of treason. Keeping MPs and the British public in the dark about importing thousands of unchecked, fighting-aged males and their families is not in our best interest. This proves what we have known all along: the Tories and Labour are more interested in protecting and providing for foreign nationals than for British citizens.”
Also writing in The Telegraph, former Veterans’ Minister Johnny Mercer noted only around 1000 Afghans served with British forces and posed the question — where are they all coming from?
“I had also made no secret of my desire to relocate Afghan special forces personnel from that country to this in the wake of August 2021,” he wrote.
“I stand by that wholeheartedly. These brave souls fought alongside us cheek by jowl — they carried the stretchers of dead UK soldiers, they fought hard and battled bravely. But there were only ever about 1000-1200 badged members of [the British-trained Afghan special forces units]. I couldn’t understand where all these Afghans were coming from.”
Independent MP Rupert Lowe, in a viral post on X, highlighted crime data showing Afghans had the highest rate sexual assault of any nationality per capita.
The figures, obtained from the Ministry of Justice under freedom of information laws earlier this year and published by The Telegraph, showed foreigners were convicted of nearly one quarter of sex crimes in the UK despite making up just 9.3 per cent of the population.
Afghans were more than 20 times more likely to account for sexual offence convictions than British citizens, at a rate of 77 convictions per 10,000 population, according to the data which covered 2021 to 2023.
Mr Tice noted that Justice Chamberlain, the High Court judge presiding over the proceedings, “questioned the need for secrecy in this arrangement as this is a resettlement scheme of thousands of people entering the UK on the bill of the taxpayer”.
“No one deserves the knowledge of who is moving here and how much it costs more than the British citizen who must live with the consequences,” he wrote.
‘No cover-up’
Former Defence Minister Ben Wallace said he stood by his decision to seek secrecy from the court in August 2023 and rejected claims of a “cover-up”.
“I make no apology for applying to the court for an injunction at the time,” he told BBC radio.
“If this leak was reported at the time, the existence of the list would put in peril those we needed to help.”
When Labour came to power in July 2024, the scheme was up and running but Mr Healey said he had been “deeply uncomfortable to be constrained from reporting” it to parliament.
“Ministers decided not to tell parliamentarians at an earlier stage about the data incident, as the widespread publicity would increase the risk of the Taliban obtaining the dataset,” he explained.
As Labour’s opposition defence spokesman, Mr Healey was briefed on the scheme in December 2023.
Mr Healey set up a review of the scheme when he became Defence Minister in the new Labour government.
This concluded there was “very little evidence of intent by the Taliban to conduct a campaign of retribution”.
The Afghan Response Route has now been closed, the Minister said, apologising for the data breach which “should never have happened”.
He estimated the total cost of relocating people to Britain from Afghanistan under the various resettlement schemes at between £5.5-£6 billion ($11.3-$12.3 billion).
Conservative Party defence spokesman James Cartlidge also apologised for the leak which happened under the previous Tory government.
But he defended the decision to keep it secret, saying the aim had been to avoid “an error by an official of the British state leading to torture or even murder of persons in the dataset at the hands of what remains a brutal Taliban regime”.
Mr Healey said all those brought to the UK from Afghanistan had been accounted for in the country’s immigration figures.
Mr Starmer has vowed to cut the number of migrants arriving in Britain.
In 2023, the UK Defence Ministry was fined £350,000 ($720,000) by a data watchdog for disclosing personal information of 265 Afghans seeking to flee Taliban fighters in the chaotic fall of Kabul two years earlier.
Britain’s Afghanistan evacuation plan was widely criticised, with the government accused by MPs of “systemic failures of leadership, planning and preparation”.
Hundreds of Afghans eligible for relocation were left behind, many with their lives potentially at risk after details of staff and job applicants were left at the abandoned British embassy in Kabul.
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