The Government is unable to calculate the total cost of a secret relocation plan it set up following the Afghan data leak, Britain’s public spending watchdog has said.
In Ministry of Defence (MoD) accounts, the amount spent on the scheme was not recorded separately to other resettlement activity following the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 2021, the National Audit Office (NAO) said.
In April 2024, the Government covertly set up the Afghanistan Response Route (ARR) for people in the country whose details were leaked “in error” by a defence official in February 2022.
The scheme was separate from the main Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (Arap), and estimated – by the MoD – to cost £850 million.
In a report published on Wednesday, the NAO said the Government had failed to provide enough evidence to give the watchdog “confidence” in the accuracy of this figure.
The watchdog said: “The MoD is not able to determine exactly what it has spent on resettling people through the ARR scheme.
“This is because it did not separately identify the costs of the ARR scheme in its accounting system, meaning that these costs were not visible in its management accounts, but instead included them within its total spending on Afghan resettlement activities.”
The MoD said it had avoided differentiating the costs in order to comply with an unprecedented superinjunction that was granted following the leak amid fears the Taliban could target would-be refugees for reprisals.
Although it does not know exactly how much it has spent on the scheme, it estimates it has spent around £400 million on relocating people through ARR so far, and will spend a further £450 million.
The costs to the whole of Government are expected to be around £128,000 per resettled individual, of which an estimated £53,000 would be met by the MoD.
Almost 19,000 applicants for the original Arap scheme had their details leaked in the breach.
But the NAO said that at the time of its report publication, the MoD “had not provided us with sufficient evidence to give us confidence regarding the completeness and accuracy of these estimates”.
An estimated 7,355 people are expected to resettle in the UK under the ARR as a direct result of the breach, according to the report.
The Liberal Democrats said the country needed answers to “how this breach happened under the Conservatives’ watch and what steps are urgently needed to tackle the confusion and chaos at the heart of the MoD”.
Helen Maguire MP, the party’s defence spokeswoman, said: “Not only has the MoD put thousands of lives at risk through its bureaucratic blunders, but now it can’t even tell the British public how much taxpayer money those blunders have cost.
“This is exactly why we need a full inquiry.”
An MoD spokesperson said: “We are committed to honouring the moral obligation we owe to those Afghans who stood with us and risked their lives.
“Since taking the decision to support the lifting of the superinjunction brought by the previous government, we have been clear on the costs associated with relocating eligible Afghans to the UK – and are fully committed to transparency.
“The cost of all Afghan resettlement schemes, including the Afghan Response Route, has been fully funded as part of the Government’s Spending Review.”
