A parliamentary inquiry has found that a data breach, which exposed the personal details of thousands of Afghans applying to come to the UK to flee the Taliban, was a "foreseeable" failure. The Commons' Defence Committee stated in a report published on Thursday that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) lacked the expertise to manage the UK's Afghan relocation scheme after the fall of Kabul and used secrecy as a "shield" against proper accountability.
The breach, which became public in August 2023, was subject to a super-injunction that prevented its reporting until July 2025. The committee's report described the incident as a "foreseeable systemic failure" caused by "inappropriate tools, weak operating procedures, insufficient training, poor organisational continuity, and an inadequate culture of data protection and accountability."
The leak involved a member of MoD personnel sharing a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet containing data for more than 18,500 applicants to the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (Arap) scheme. Committee chairman Tan Dhesi criticised the MoD's use of Excel as a "continuing cultural failure" and said the wider Afghan relocation scheme was "utterly and obviously inadequate."
A MoD spokesperson acknowledged the incident "should never have happened" and welcomed the opportunity to learn from it. They stated that thousands of eligible Afghans have been relocated and reforms are in place, including improved data protection standards and strengthened case-working processes.