The UK's migrant crisis is costing British taxpayers £269billion, data shows.
The staggering cost comes after it emerged that thousands of Afghans are being relocated to the UK as part of a secret £850million scheme set up after a personal data leak on who supported British forces.
Successive governments have spent years fighting to keep it under wraps using an unprecedented super-injunction, which has now been lifted.
The leak led the Government to earmark £7billion to relocate Afghan refugees to the UK over five years, piling pressure on the Chancellor, who is facing increasing pressure to break her fiscal promises.
As Britain grapples with the ballooning costs of housing asylum seekers, data shows that the Afghan relocation is merely the tip of the iceberg (see chart below).
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|The staggering £269billion cost to British taxpayers as Afghan scandal adds millions more to bill
Publicly available data shows that £1billion has been forked out on "UK & UK/France costs" for policing the small boats crisis.
A further £6billion has been spent by the UK Government on "social housing subsidies for foreign-born" people.
Universal Credit for non-UK nationals amounts to £12billion a year.
Meanwhile, accommodation for refugees and asylum seekers has cost British taxpayers £15billion, while a staggering £200billion to £234billion has been spent on giving migrants indefinite leave to remain.
Data also shows £140million has been spent on translating English into other languages.
The migrant crisis has long been a hot-button issue in the UK, dominating French President Emmanuel Macron's state visit last week.
The diplomatic trip resulted in UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer announcing a pilot "one in, one out" scheme for new arrivals into the country.
Expected to come into effect within weeks, it will see migrants arriving on small boats returned to France, in exchange for asylum seekers who have not tried to enter the UK illegally.
GETTY | It was feared that the leak would put thousands of Afghans on the Taliban's kill list
It saw UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer announce a pilot scheme, "one in, one out", for new arrivals into the country.
Expected to come into effect within weeks, it will see migrants arriving on small boats returned to France, in exchange for asylum seekers who have not tried to enter the UK illegally.
Tensions flared up this week after a lifted super-injunction revealed that in February 2022, a defence official accidentally sent a list of tens of thousands of names of Afghans as he attempted to help verify applications for sanctuary in the country.
The names have been referred to as the "kill list" of Afghans who had worked alongside the British Army, along with their family members.
Ministers secured the first ever British Government obtained super-injunction after concerns were raised that the public, and effectively the Taliban, could see the list.
However, a senior Taliban official told The Telegraph "we got the list from the internet during the very first days it was leaked".
Speaking to MPs after the injunction was lifted, John Healey, the Defence Secretary, offered a “sincere apology” for the incident, which was echoed by the shadow defence secretary.
Mr Healey also said that he had felt “deeply concerned about the lack of transparency” around the data breach.