Afghanistan

Baroness Goldie Excerpts

Wednesday 16th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the Minister for taking the time to speak with me extensively before the Statement. I thank him and his colleague, the Secretary of State for Defence in the other place, for the tone they have adopted. I join the Secretary of State and my honourable friend the shadow Secretary of State James Cartlidge in their apology, on behalf of the British Government, to all those impacted by the data leak. It was a wholly unacceptable breach of data protection protocols and should never have happened.

This is a story of human error, an error of magnitude with profoundly grave and potentially tragic consequences, that was perpetrated by an MoD official and came to light only some 18 months or so after it occurred. Although as a Defence Minister I had no involvement in the issue, at that point in August 2023 the priority was to take all necessary steps as a matter of urgency to mitigate risk to life, hence the court’s involvement that culminated in the grant of a super-injunction. It was the political judgment of the last Government to seek the court’s intervention, and the decision of the court to grant a super-injunction clearly reflected how gravely the court regarded the risk to life. A court injunction is neither a cover-up nor political suppression of information; it is a court order.

No one should be under any misunderstanding about the potential consequence of this leak. If the Government had not sought the injunction, that data could have been disseminated globally through the media. This could have put the lives of countless Afghans at risk—people who helped Britain in our fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, who saved the lives of British troops and who are incredibly brave, selfless and committed individuals who put everything at risk, including their families, to help us. If the Government had not sought to prevent the information being disseminated, those Afghans, who gave so much, could have been captured, tortured and murdered. The previous Government would have abnegated their responsibilities if we had left these Afghans to suffer the consequences of this data breach. That is why it was right to seek the injunction and resettle those affected in the UK.

I might observe that, regardless of what Government were in power at the time, these measures were the correct ones to take in the circumstances existing at the time. Indeed, on taking office, the current Government did not seek to have the super-injunction lifted.

Although this was human error and not a political mistake, the political responsibility is to keep the situation under review. It was right that this Government should seek expert advice on whether it was now appropriate to seek to lift the super-injunction and, if so advised, to make the necessary application to the court. In that, the Government have the full support of these Benches.

I understand that the Minister will be limited in what he can say, but I have a few questions for him. Is he in a position to give the House any more details on how the leak happened? I would have thought that there would have been digital safeguards within the MoD that prevented an email with a sensitive attachment being sent to a random person outside the department. What processes were in place to prevent this happening, and why were they not effective? Secondly, can the Minister tell us what the repercussions were for the official who inadvertently sent the data outside formal channels? Finally, what systems have the Government now put in place to learn from this regrettable episode and ensure that everything has been done to prevent a recurrence? As ever, I look forward to the Minister’s response, and I once again thank him for the manner in which he has approached this matter to date.

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister and to the Minister for the Armed Forces for a briefing yesterday. It meant that, temporarily, I was under a super-injunction. I was a little surprised when I was summoned to the MoD. On Monday afternoon I received a message asking me to come in for a confidential briefing. I had no idea what to expect, or of the magnitude of what we would hear in the Statement made by the Secretary of State yesterday.

It is a matter of extreme seriousness for a variety of reasons—the risk into which an official and the MoD placed Afghans who were already vulnerable, but also the fact that Parliament was entirely unable to scrutinise His Majesty’s Government on this issue for almost two years. The media reported immediately after the super-injunction was raised yesterday at midday; they had spent the last 22 months gathering evidence that, of course, they could not publish. There is a whole set of questions that are probably beyond the remit of the Minister who is responding today on behalf of the MoD, including what scrutiny Parliament is able to do and what the Government feel is appropriate regarding the media. Were the media being suppressed?

Lest anyone think that I am being cavalier about the lives of Afghans, it was absolutely clear that the United Kingdom had a duty to those Afghans who worked alongside His Majesty’s Armed Forces, including the interpreters and those who worked for the British Council. In light of that, the ARAP and ACRS schemes, which we all knew about, were the right approach. Yet we already knew, from open source material and cases that were brought to this House and the other place, that breaches of data had caused fines to be paid.

At the time of the evacuation of Afghanistan in August 2021, it was clear that many people were left behind, and that the helplines were not necessarily fit for purpose. The hotline for parliamentarians and their staff did not necessarily act as a hotline at all. I certainly left messages about cases and received no follow-up or reply. I was not alone in that and, although I believe that I was not part of this data breach, some parliamentarians were.

We began to acknowledge our debt to some of the Afghans, but not all. Then a data breach, about which we knew nothing, happened over three years ago. That in itself is shocking. Has anybody in His Majesty’s Government taken responsibility for that? We understand from the Statement that it was reported to the Metropolitan Police, which believed that there was no criminal activity. Has anybody taken responsibility for this catastrophic data breach that potentially put many tens of thousands of lives in Afghanistan at risk and caused considerable concern to Afghans who were already in the UK, having come over as part of the ARAP scheme?

The former Secretary of State, Sir Ben Wallace, has said that the super-injunction was not a cover-up, as has the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie. Yet Mr Justice Chamberlain, who finally lifted the super-injunction yesterday, said in November 2023 that a super-injunction

“is likely to give rise to understandable suspicion that the court’s processes are being used for the purposes of censorship … This is corrosive of the public’s trust in Government”.

Does the Minister agree? Can he confirm that this Government would not seek to use a super-injunction or, in the event that it was felt that a super-injunction was an appropriate course of action, that it would not last for more than 600 days but could be for a very limited amount of time while a particular, specific policy needed to be undertaken? The substantive policy change that was brought in—the Afghanistan response route—seems to have been very sensible. Had it been brought to your Lordships’ House and the other place, parliamentarians may well have thought that it was the right policy and been happy to endorse it—but we were never asked, because of the super-injunction. We knew nothing about it.

Could the Minister tell us whether, in future, the Intelligence and Security Committee might be briefed in camera? What role would Parliament and the media be allowed to play? If the courts, Parliament and the media are not deployed appropriately, that raises questions about our own democracy that need to be considered.