UK Defence Minister John Healey recently disclosed the scheme in the UK parliament after the UK High Court lifted a suppression order banning any reports of the program.

In February 2022, a spreadsheet containing the names and details of almost 19,000 Afghans who had asked to be relocated to Britain was accidentally leaked by a UK official just six months after Taliban fighters seized Kabul, parliament was told.

“This was a serious departmental error. Lives may have been at stake,” Mr Healey said.

The previous Conservative government put in place the program in 2024 to help Afghans “judged to be at the highest risk of reprisals by the Taliban”, he said.

Around 900 Afghans and 3,600 family members have now been brought to Britain or are in transit under the programme known as the Afghan Response Route, at a cost of around $US 535 million.

Applications from 600 more people have also been accepted.

They are among around 36,000 Afghans who have been accepted by Britain under different schemes since the August 2021 fall of Kabul.

As Labour’s opposition defence spokesman, Healey was briefed on the scheme in December 2023, but the Conservative government asked a court to impose a “super-injunction” banning any mention of it in parliament or by the press.

When Labour came to power in July 2024, the scheme was in full swing.

“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,” Mr Healey said.

Mr Healey set up a review of the scheme when he became defence minister in the new Labour government which 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 from Afghanistan to Britain at about $US10 billion.

Conservative party defence spokesman James Cartlidge also apologised for the leak but 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”.

All Afghans brought to the UK from Afghanistan had been accounted for in the country’s immigration figures, the government said.