Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask His Majesty's Government what is the breakdown of costs, by month, of flights used on the Afghanistan Response Route since its inception, including costs of (1) any Royal Air Force or government flights, and (2) any charter flights, with details of which organisation provided the charter.

In February 2022, under the previous Government a spreadsheet with names and other information relating of individual applicants of the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP) – the resettlement scheme for Afghan citizens who worked for or with the UK Armed Forces in Afghanistan – was emailed outside of official Government systems.

The previous Government decided to seek an injunction concerning the breach and the High Court granted a super-injunction. They also decided to set up a new secret resettlement route, called the Afghanistan Response Route (ARR). The ARR was created to support a limited cohort of people who were affected by the data loss incident and who were previously thought to be at the highest risk, into the UK.

The current Secretary of State then commissioned an independent policy review from former Deputy Chief of Defence Intelligence, Paul Rimmer. This began earlier this year and was presented to Ministers in June. The review examined the overall policy context in spring 2025, three years since the data incident and concluded that it appears “highly unlikely” that merely being on the dataset would be grounds for targeting.

As the Defence Secretary outlined in his oral statement of 15 July 2025, the Rimmer review was a very significant element in the Government’s decision to change policy to close the ARR, though not the sole element. We have now made the matter public so it can be subject to full Parliamentary scrutiny.

To resettle those under the ARR, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) uses mixed cohort flights to relocate Afghans to the UK under the schemes that make up the Afghan Resettlement Programme (ARP). This includes the ARR and ARAP scheme. These flights have also included a small number of persons eligible for the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme (ACRS).

The MOD has used both RAF and charter flights. Additionally, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) to resettle eligible Afghans has run charter flights. For reasons that are commercially and operationally sensitive, we cannot name the companies that organised the charter flights.

The average total monthly costs from MOD charter flights, Royal Air Force flights and IOM charter flights is to date £457,833.33.