Healey says the leak happened when an official sent an email which he thought had the names of 150 people who were applying for resettlement under the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (Arap),But in fact the email contained the names of almost 19,000 Afghans who had applied for either the Arap scheme or the ex-gratia scheme, another programme open to Afghans who worked for the British in Afghanistan before the military drawdown,Journalists became aware of the leak, and a court granted a superinjunction preventing reporting of this,He says eight organisations and journalists have been told not to report what happened under this superinjunction, which has been in place for nearly two years,He says a scheme was set up to relocate Afghans particularly at risk.

It was called the Afghan Response Route (ARR).He says about 3,000 people were covered by the ARR.They were subject to strict security checks before admitted to the UK, and they were included in the figures released publicly for the total number of Afghans admitted to the UK.Healey says, as shadow defence secretary, he was briefed on this.He says he was presented with the superinjunction at the start of that meeting.

He says other cabinet ministers only found out about this scheme after the election,Coming into office, he was “deeply concerned about the lack of transparency to Parliament and to the public”, he says,Healey say he set up a review of that scheme,It was carried out by Paul Rimmer,The review concluded there was a limted risk of retaliation by the Taliban to Afghans who were named on the original leak.

He says the Taliban would have already have had access to information that might have allowed them to identify these people,He says the review concluded the current ARR policy was an “extremely significant intervention to address the potentially limited net additional risk”,He says he is closing the scheme today,And the superinjunction has been lifted,He says about 900 have come to the UK or are in transit under the ARR scheme, with 3,600 family members.

It has cost £400m, he says.He says the MoD has tried to contact everyone affected to the data leak to alert them.It has not been possible to contact everyone, he says.But there is a website where anyone who thinks they might have been on the list can seek information.And Healey offers an apology to those affected.

Personal information about more than 33,000 Afghans seeking relocation to the UK after the Taliban takeover was released in error by a defence official – and the Ministry of Defence tried for nearly two years to cover up the leak and its consequences.Rachel Reeves has unveiled a package of City changes meant to cut “unnecessary” red tape and encourage more financial risk-taking by companies and consumers in the hopes of spurring economic growth.Donald Trump has said he does not want parliament to be recalled for his state visit to the UK, praising Keir Starmer, and saying that, despite being a liberal, the prime minister was straightening out a “sloppy” Brexit.Election officials should consider banning political donations made in cryptocurrency, a minister has said, amid concerns that foreign powers are using untraceable money to influence British politics.For a full list of all the stories covered on the blog today, do scroll through the list of key event headlines near the top of the blog.

Keir Starmer faces another defence-related headache, according to a story by Patrick Maguire and Charlie Parker at the Times,They report that Al Carns, a former soldier who is veterans minister, is threatening to resign over the government’s plans to repeal the Tories’s Northern Ireland Legacy Act giving soldiers (and terrorists) immunity from prosecution over Troubles-era offences if they cooperate with a reconciliation commission,Carns “is said to have told ministers that he cannot support any proposal that would leave veterans vulnerable to criminal proceedings”, the Times reports,In the Commons John Healey, defence secretary, said he expected Commons select committees to investigate the Afghan data leak,But the Conservative MP Mark Pritchard says that is not satisfactory because select committees do not get access to top secret information.

Defence Secretary keen to suggest a Commons Select Cttee investigate MOD data breach,No surprise, he knows likely to be muted without access to classified MOD material? Select Cttees do not have top secret clearance,Only one Committee does - the ISC, which is NOT a Select CtteeAt the afternoon Downing Street lobby briefing the PM’s spokesperson refused to say if the person responsible for the Afghan data breach had been disciplined or sacked,Asked if the person was still working for the government, the spokesperson said:We wouldn’t, obviously, as you’d expect, comment on individuals,Since the defence secretary came in, the government’s put a huge emphasis on fixing issues in the MoD in relation to data security, and indeed across government.

The spokersperson said he could not comment on “individual disciplinary issues”.The spokesperson also said the government was glad this was now out in the open.The government of course welcomes, and as a matter of principle thinks it is right, as you can see in this case, for the public and Parliament to be able to scrutinise all of government’s plans.But, asked whether he was ruling out superinjunctions being used by the government in future, he said: “I don’t think it’s something I can comment on.”The Tory opposition day motion saying that the two-child benefit cap should stay, because “those who receive benefits should make the same decisions about having children as those who do not”, has been voted down by 440 votes to 106.

But Alison McGovern, the welfare minister who was speaking for the government, said Labour would not get rid of the cap until it could say how it would pay for that measure.She said:Our universal credit review is considering ways that the system can improve in order to stabilise family finances and provide routes into good work.And on the two-child limit, specifically, the consequences of the Conservative choices made over the past decade and a half are clear for all to see.We have rightly said many times we will not commit to any policy without knowing how we are going to pay for it.The Ministry of Defence has published a data incident self-checker designed to help Afghans who think they may have been on the list that was leaked of 18,714 people applying for support from the UK because they worked for British forces in Afghanistan.

According to a story by Tony Diver and Gareth Corfield for the Telegraph, there have been fears in Whitehall that today’s revelation about the secret Afghan relocation plan could lead to rioting.They say:A Whitehall briefing note circulated on July 4, seen by The Telegraph, warned that when the injunction was lifted, the Ministry of Defence would need to “work with colleagues across government...to mitigate any risk of public disorder following the discharge of the injunction”.

They also quote official advice saying that 15 of the 20 worst areas for rioting last summer were in the top 20% of local authorities for the highest number of asylum seekers and Afghan resettlement arrivals,Donald Trump is going to meet Keir Starmer later this month in Aberdeen, the president has said,It was confirmed yesterday that the two men will meet when Trump makes a private visit to Scotland, where he owns two golf courses, later this month,Trump has now said the meeting will ill be “up in Aberdeen, which is the oil capital of Europe”, PA News reports,Trump added:They should bring it back too.

They have so much oil there.They should get rid of the windmills and bring back the oil.Cause the windmills are really detrimental to the beauty of Scotland and every other place they go up.Trump has a particular aversion to windfarms.The Demos thinktank has published a report today into the extent to which “community notes” – a crowdsourced moderation tool used by X, Elon Musk’s social media platform – managed to limit the amount of false and harmful information being spread on X last summer during the riots triggered by the Southport killings.

The system didn’t work, Demos concludes,Overall, this paper has provided the first evaluation of the efficacy of community notes during the Southport riots - a case study of its effectiveness in a crisis situation,It has demonstrated that community notes failed to mitigate the false information that fuelled the violent disorder,As such, it offers strong evidence that the system is not fit for purpose in crisis situations,Whilst community notes offers a fresh solution to moderating misleading posts in every-day contexts, its reliance on consensus makes it fundamentally unfit to respond fast enough in polarised situations.

More than 20 union leaders have expressed their deep concern over the apparent erosion of the right to peaceful protest, piling pressure on the Metropolitan police over its handling of pro-Palestinian marches at the start of the year, Aletha Adu reports,The Green party says the Afghan data breach revelations today are shocking,In a statement, the Green MP Ellie Chowns said:It is nothing short of horrifying that a British security breach exposed the personal details of thousands of Afghans who risked everything to stand alongside our forces, leaving them and their families exposed to persecution, torture, or worse at the hands of the Taliban,It’s truly shocking that proper data protection practices were not in place to prevent such a dangerous event,And though the government has assured parliament that action has been taken to prevent such a leak from happening again, this does not negate the great danger posed to thousands through sheer carelessness.

A growing number of climate groups are campaigning for the introduction of a wealth tax to ensure the transition to a sustainable economy is not done “on the backs of the poor”, Matthew Taylor reports.In his Substack account of being subject to the superinjunction that prevented reportig of the Afghan data leak, Lewis Goodall says he found himself sitting in court wondering what other information was being held back from the publicThe government has spent a huge amount of money on this case.Defending its right to secrecy over our right to know, cloaked under Afghans right to life, but not to know.I worry about where this leaves our democracy, I worry about what precedent it sets, I worry about how easy it is in our system, for the executive to act without restraint.For all of its problems, this could never have happened in the United States, with its first amendment rights, and constitutionally bound freedom of expression.

So many times I sat in court 27 and wondered- what else don’t we know? Might there be other courts like this, in other cases? In my view, there never ever should.This case, is about a question as old as politics itself- who guards the guardians?In the Commons earlier Mark Pritchard (Con) asked John Healey:How do we know there’s not another superinjunction about another leak? But of course he couldn’t tell us, could he?In response, Healey, the defence secretary, said: “If there is another superinjunction, I’ve not been read in.”Lewis Goodall from the News Agents podcast is another of the journalists who was stopped from reporting the Afghan data leak story by the superjunction.He has written a long account of the case on his Substack blog, and he claims that the original superinjunction was unprecedented.In an emergency online session, the government made the case that the risk to life was so great, that they needed to be sure that knowledge of the incident went no further, by force of law.

No-one should be allowed to report anything,Remarkably, the judge involved, Justice Robin Knowles, offered to the government more than they’d requested- indeed, a constitutional innovation,He suggested that they ought to have a superinjunction, ie that not only would I not be not be permitted to report the story, but that I could not even report that I had been prevented from reporting the story,To our knowledge, this has never happened before,Superinjunctions are usually the preserve of celebrities and individuals who, for one reason or another, wish to protect their privacy.

It is far rarer for organisations or private companies to employ them, or at least for the courts to grant them,It is unknown for governments to use them to protect their own mistakes,He also says that, while at first the superinjunction was arguably justified on the grounds that it was needed to protect people before they were relocated, over time the motivation seemed to change,Eventually, we were summoned to another hearing, where I expected news that the super would be discharged, or at the very least a date where that would happen,To my astonishment, there was no prospect of this- instead the government was changing the rules of the game.

It became clear, via the court documents that initially at least, the then Sunak government was not proposing to help very many people as a result of the breach at all - around 200 principals, perhaps up to 1000 in all including family members - 1% of the total number potentially affected and at at least some risk.Despite the relatively modest efforts to relocate people, the government were not proposing to discharge the injunction.This injunction was no longer about getting people out, but keeping the story in.Goodall says he ended up concluding the story was being suppressed for political reasons.With each hearing that went by, I could only feel more and more unease.

I had understood the initial justification.But once that slipped away, it felt to me that the motives were darker.Consider the context: the Sunak government at the fag end of its time in office, embattled, under siege.This was a catastrophic data breach and it would be a huge story, embodying their incompetence.It also went to the heart of wider politics.

Was it conceivable or credible that politics was not playing a major role in the decision making? It became clear, as part of the court documents, that one of the things which had been discussed at the cabinet subcommittee convened to consider the matter was the pressure on asylum hotels and the fact that it was govt policy to reduce their usage, something which was incompatible with a policy of bringing more people in.This story, two decades and seven governments in the making, went to the heart of domestic politics, in a general election year and no-one had a clue it was happening.The MoD has now published the full text of John Healey’s statement to MPs about the Afghan data breach, and the secret resettlement scheme set up as a result.Julian Lewis (Con), a former chair of both the Commons defence and parliament’s intelligence and security committee, told John Healey that he was worried about the decision to close all relocation schemes for Afghans who worked with the British before the Taliban took control again.Lewis said:What worries me more than the lifting of this superinjunction is the fact that we’ve closed down all the Afghan schemes at the very time that undocumented Afghans who felt it necessary to flee to Iran and to Pakistan are being rounded up for forcible repatriation to an Afghanistan led by the Taliban.

I understand that the investigation over our obligation to the Triples, the special forces that our forces trained, will be continuing, and I welcome that,Can the secretary of state confirm that despite the closure of the schemes, anybody who is found to have worked very closely with our armed forces, who is in imminent danger, can still be rescued and admitted to this country?Healey said that Afghans who felt they needed to relocate to Britain had had “ample time” to apply,None of the schemes were existed to become permanent, he said,He went on:On the Arap applicants, the sort of Afghans (he) is concerned about, where there are applications in our system remaining to be processed, we will complete that job,In the Commons Lincoln Jopp, a Conservative who led the Scots Guards in 2010 in Afghanistan, asked John Healey about the Times report (see 2.

18pm), saying that Larisa Brown had identified a solidier as being to blame.In his opening statement, John Healey just said it was the person was a defence official.Jopp asked Healey if he could be more explicit, and say whether it was a civil servant, or a special adviser, or a solider.He said using the term “defence official” was a practice that “might come back to bite'” Healey if he continued with it.Healey did not address that question, but he told Jopp: “The challenge I faced, the challenge this government faced was far bigger than the actions of one official that long ago