MoD does not know exact cost to date of Afghan data breach resettlement scheme, says NAO report

• MoD cannot calculate exactly how much it has spent on the ARR scheme because it did not separately identify the costs in its accounting system. 
• Around £850 million – MoD's estimated cost to government for resettling people in the UK through the ARR scheme as a result of the February 2022 data breach, not including legal costs or compensation claims.
• 7,355 – estimated number of people who will be resettled through the ARR scheme in the UK as a direct result of the data breach.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) cannot determine exactly how much it has spent on resettling people in the UK through the Afghanistan Response Route (ARR) scheme and to date has not provided enough evidence to give the National Audit Office (NAO) confidence in its estimate of £850 million in relation to past and future costs, according to a new report.^1,2

In April 2024, the government launched the ARR scheme specifically for those whose personal information was leaked in a February 2022 data breach, who were ineligible for any of the other government resettlement schemes in operation,³ and who were at significant risk of reprisal by the ruling Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

The MoD did not record exactly how much it had spent on resettling people through the ARR scheme because it did not separately identify these costs in its accounting system, instead including them within its total spending on Afghan resettlement activities. It has stated that it did this to maintain the secrecy of the ARR scheme while a super-injunction was in place preventing disclosure of both the data breach and the existence of the injunction itself.⁴

The MoD has estimated the total past and future costs of resettling individuals through the ARR scheme to be around £850 million, of which it estimates it had spent around £400 million by July 2025. However, at the time of the report's publication, it had not provided sufficient evidence to give the NAO confidence regarding the completeness and accuracy of its estimates. The MoD will incur at least £2.5 million in related legal costs. It does not yet know how much related compensation claims may cost.

The total cost to the MoD of all Afghan resettlement activity between 2021 and 2029 is forecast to exceed £2 billion. Between 2021-22 and 2024-25, the MoD recorded spending a total of £563 million on Afghan resettlement schemes, including the ARR scheme. It expects to spend a further £1.5 billion by March 2029.⁵

In early July 2025, the government closed the ARR scheme to new applicants. At the end of the same month, the MoD estimated that 7,355 people would be eligible for resettlement in the UK through the scheme directly as a result of the data breach.⁶

ENDS
Notes to editors

1. The report will be available on the NAO website via the following link from 00:01 Wednesday 3 September: https://www.nao.org.uk/reports/the-afghanistan-response-route/ 
2. The report is a factual account of the ARR scheme which the NAO has prepared to support the Public Accounts Committee's scrutiny of the MoD. The MoD set up the scheme to mitigate the security risks arising from a data protection breach and the unauthorised disclosure of personal information which occurred in February 2022. The report does not seek to evaluate the MoD's management of or spending on the ARR scheme, nor does it assess the evidence which led to the super-injunction being issued, maintained and then lifted, or any other aspects of the legal process. The NAO has reviewed financial information on the costs of the ARR scheme, but it has not audited this information.
3. Figure 1 in the report lists the five Afghan resettlement routes established by the government between 2010 and 2025.
4. In reaching its decision to grant the super-injunction, the High Court accepted the MoD's assessment that if the existence of the data loss became widely known, the Taliban would be highly likely to obtain the data, which would put the safety and lives of many individuals and their families at risk.
5. Figure 5 in the report sets out at a high level the MoD's actual spending and future funding on Afghan resettlement schemes. The NAO is intending to perform further analysis of these costs in an upcoming report on Afghan resettlement schemes, which is due for publication in Spring 2026.
6. 1,531 individuals and an estimated 5,824 of their family members who were affected by the data breach.