Defence chiefs want £2.5billion for expenses that include compensation for the data breach that left thousands of Afghans at risk of Taliban reprisals.
The shock figure was buried in a Treasury report that admitted officials withheld details from the National Audit Office.
While the huge ‘Non-Budget Expenditure’ sum includes other legal challenges, it confirms the cost of covering the entirely preventable data leak.
The Central Government Supply Estimates document states the £2,564,517,000 figure is needed to ‘reflect a prior year adjustment’ and to ‘address concerns over the completeness if compensation and costs’ are to be settled.
Those claims include ‘compensation and resettlement costs relating to the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy [ARAP] and the Afghan Response Route’.
The document stated the adjustment was necessary to take into account new information. It said the MoD ‘did not allow for the impact of this adjustment in either its Main or Supplementary Estimates’.
The note concludes that parliamentary authority is sought to provide for the excess expenditure ‘by an Excess Vote’.
For months, thousands of Afghans were secretly flown to this country and housed on UK military bases.
A spokesperson from Defence Secretary John Healey’s department said the Afghan Resettlement Programme is expected to cost ‘between £5.5billion to £6billion’ on Thursday night
The operation followed the worst data breach in British history, when thousands of Afghans who supported the UK campaign had their identities leaked.
In February 2022, an unnamed official accidentally emailed details of 18,714 Afghan nationals, who applied to be relocated to the UK, to an address outside a secure network.
The MoD discovered the leak only in August the following year.
On Thursday night, it said: ‘We’ve fully laid out the estimated costs of the schemes under the Afghan Resettlement Programme, which are expected to be between £5.5billion to £6billion.
‘Within those figures, it’s estimated that costs Afghan Response Route, which relates to the data breach, may be up to £850million.’
