Afghans let into the Britain following a secret data breach do not have a connection to the UK and are not eligible to enter the country under existing special schemes, Defence Secretary John Healey has told GB News.
Healey, who revealed a super-injunction had been lifted on the £850million relocation deal yesterday, also confirmed that many of the names on the leaked dossier were not likely to face a heightened risk to their lives.
Almost 7,000 Afghan nations are now being relocated to the UK as a result of the data breach.
The personal information of around 20,000 individuals was inadvertently shared with the Taliban - with up to 100,000 Afghans being impacted.
Speaking to the People’s Channel, Healey said: "There were indeed nearly 19,000 individuals named on this data set and in some cases there were some family members identified.
"Many of these people have no connection with Britain.
“They're not eligible for the special schemes that Britain put in place to recognise the duty that we owe to those that served or worked with our Armed Forces.
"Nevertheless, this is a huge data breach that has never been disclosed.
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|Defence Secretary John Healey
“It led to the previous Government taking part in a secret resettlement scheme, bringing Afghans to this country, and covered all by a totally unprecedented super-injunction that meant the public couldn't know about it, the press couldn't report about it and Parliament couldn't scrutinise it.
"All that changed yesterday because of the announcement I made yesterday."
The Defence Secretary added: "Where people have helped our forces, worked alongside our forces, put their own lives on the line, they are eligible for a different scheme, the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (Arap) scheme, that has had all party support and is an important way that our country discharges that duty to them.
"The names on this list are not eligible for that, and the important step that I've been able to take off the back of an independent review that I commissioned is a fresh look at the situation in Afghanistan now, nearly four years on from the Taliban takeover, which identifies and concludes it's highly unlikely that simply being a name on this data set increases the risk of being targeted in Afghanistan."
GETTY | A convoy of Taliban security personnel is seen moving along the streets as they celebrate the third anniversary of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan
Healey’s comments come after the previous Conservative Government set up the secret scheme to relocate Afghan nationals in 2023.
Some 5,400 more Afghans who have already received invitation letters will be flown to the UK in the coming weeks, bringing the total number of Afghans affected by the breach being brought to the UK to 23,900.
Mr Justice Chamberlain opted to lift the super-injunction yesterday after saying that the Ministry of Defence’s internal review found that the Taliban "likely already possess the key information in the dataset".
After the super-injunction being lifted, Healey told MPs that the person involved in the leak was “no longer doing the same job”, before offering a “sincere apology”.
GETTY | John Healey
Despite ex-Defence Secretary Ben Wallace refusing to apologise, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch said: "The first thing that came to mind is that this is what people are angry about, that if you had been working in a job in the private sector and something like that had happened, you'd be out on your ear.
"And it just reminded me of one of the frustrations I had as a Minister, that because you couldn't sack civil servants, they kind of knew that they could do whatever they liked. At worse, they'd be moved to another department."
However, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage brutally swiped at the Tories and warned that known sex offenders had been allowed to come to Britain under the scheme.
Farage said: "The Afghan scandal has broken. Extraordinary that a British Government put a super-injunction on all the British media, that lasted for over two years, to cover-up a story of incompetence, dishonesty and a threat to our own national security.
X / NIGEL FARAGE | Nigel Farage lashed out at the Conservative Party"An email mis-sent published the names of 100,000 people in Afghanistan that were available to the Taliban.
"Many of them helped us during that 20 year war there, others were known to us for being, frankly, just bad people.
"Either way, it was decided in 2023 that we would airlift many of them out of Afghanistan, a process that continues to this day.
"We decided that 25,000 of the 100,000 should come to the United Kingdom. Amongst the number that have come are convicted sex offenders. I am not, I promise, making any of this up."