National Audit Office lacks confidence in the ministry’s estimate of £850m cost of the Afghanistan Response Route scheme, carried out secretly to resettle 7,355 people after leaked data
The Ministry of Defence cannot specify exactly what it has spent on the Afghanistan Response Route (ARR) scheme, as it did not identify its costs in its accounting system and has not provided sufficient evidence to support its £850m cost estimate, according to a report from the National Audit Office.
The ministry launched the ARR in April 2024 to resettle Afghans who had worked for or with UK armed forces and whose personal data had been leaked in February 2022, putting them at risk of reprisals by the country’s ruling Taliban regime. The leak was caused by an MoD official sending a file with data on 18,714 Afghans who had applied to relocate to the UK outside authorised government systems.
In August 2023, the ministry found that some of this data had been published on Facebook. It was removed, and the High Court granted a legal super injunction barring reporting of both the data loss and the ARR scheme. Both were disclosed in July this year by Defence Secretary John Healey.
In a report, the NAO says the MoD recorded the scheme’s costs as part of its total spending on resettling Afghans to comply with the terms of the super injunction. The ministry has estimated that the total past and future cost of resettlement will reach £850m, with around £400m spent by July this year. This does not include legal costs, which have already reached £2.5m, and compensation costs, which are yet to be determined. Based on the MoD’s estimates, the government will spend £128,000 for each of the 7,355 people it currently estimates will be resettled through the scheme.
The NAO states that it requested documents to support the figures provided, adding: “Within the time frame available, we were unable to obtain the standard of assurance on these costs that we would normally expect.” Of the estimates produced by the MoD, it said: “At the time of publication, the MoD had not provided us with sufficient evidence to give us confidence regarding the completeness and accuracy of these estimates.”
The NAO is working on a report on all the MoD’s Afghan resettlement schemes for publication in spring 2026.
