Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, how many Afghan nationals have been offered sanctuary under (a) the Afghan Relocations and Resettlement scheme, (b) ARAP and (c) ACRS; how many of those remain in Afghanistan; and what assessment he has made of the risks to those Afghans following the recent data breach.

Though in previous responses to Parliamentary Questions the Department have released internal ARAP data, as the Home Office now publish Afghanistan Resettlement Programme (ARP) data on behalf of the Government, the number of Afghan nationals who have been offered relocation and have resettled in the UK can be found in the Home Office statistics linked below. Information relating to the number of Afghans who remain in Afghanistan who have received an offer of relocation has been withheld as release would risk revealing the identity and the safety of those relocating. Furthermore, this release would be likely to damage UK interests abroad.

Link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/immigration-statistics-quarterly-release

The UK made an ambitious and generous commitment to help at-risk people in Afghanistan and, so far, we have brought around 38,700 people to safety, including thousands of people eligible for our Afghan schemes.

Afghanistan Resettlement Schemes operational data is published quarterly with the last publication on the 21 August 2025.

The data published within the immigration system statistics release (year ending June 2025, published 21 August 2025) provides a breakdown of arrivals by quarter.

The number of individuals resettled under the schemes is as follows:

19,048 under ARAP. 10,160 individuals under ACRS Pathway 1, 1,406 individuals under ACRS Pathway 2 and 1,679 individuals under ACRS Pathway 3.

As recognised by the Rimmer Review, the human rights picture in Afghanistan was dire, prior to and regardless of the data loss incident.

However, while Afghanistan remains a dangerous place, the Rimmer Review does conclude that it is “highly unlikely” that merely being on the dataset would be grounds for targeting, and that it is unlikely that family members will be targeted simply because the principal appears in the dataset. It also concludes that the dataset is unlikely to substantially change an individual’s existing exposure given the volume of data already available to the Taleban and the fact that links to the former Government are widely known.