What is the cost of the UK’s Afghan resettlement schemes?

In recent days we’ve seen seemingly contradictory claims about the cost of the Afghan Response Route (ARR), a relocation scheme set up for Afghans at risk of reprisals after being named in a data breach who were not eligible for resettlement under pre-existing schemes.

News of the leak has been widely reported after a super-injunction preventing the media from covering it was lifted on 15 July, with several newspapers making seemingly different claims about the scale and cost of the relocation scheme.

The front page of the Daily Mail newspaper on 16 July claimed “18,500 Afghans were brought to Britain as part of £7bn scheme without public knowing”, and said that there was a “projected £7 billion cost”, while the Daily Telegraph’s front page referred to a “£7bn Afghan migrant cover-up”. It also said the data leak “led the government to earmark £7 billion to relocate Afghan refugees to the UK over five years”.

The i meanwhile reported that “Three Afghan schemes together will cost UK £6bn”, and the Metro referred to an “£850m Afghan airlift cover-up”.

The government has said that the overall cost of the ARR scheme specifically is likely to be around £800-£850 million, and that the £7 billion figure refers to the combined cost of all schemes used to relocate Afghan refugees, including those set up prior to the data leak.

What was the leak?

The ARR is a direct consequence of the leaking of a dataset that included details of individuals who had applied to two UK government relocation schemes for Afghans who had worked with or for the UK government and were trying to flee the Taliban following the group’s return to power in Afghanistan in 2021—the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP) and Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme (ACRS).

The names and personal details of over 18,700 Afghans who had applied to either the ARAP scheme or the ex-gratia scheme for former locally employed staff were included in the data, alongside, in some cases, information about their families.

The data was accidentally leaked in early 2022, and part of it was published on Facebook in August 2023, after which a super-injunction was granted to the Ministry of Defence (MOD), preventing the media and others from reporting that the leak had taken place.

The super-injunction was lifted on 15 July after a recent MOD report found the Taliban “likely already possess the key information in the dataset”, that it was unlikely individuals would be targeted due to their work for the UK, the former Afghanistan government and other allied governments, and as such that access to the dataset would be “unlikely substantially to raise the risk faced by the individuals whose data it includes.”

According to the High Court judgment lifting the super-injunction, as of May 2025, 35,245 people had already been relocated to the UK through the three schemes—ARAP, ACRS and ARR, including 16,156 who were “affected by the data breach”. On 16 July, defence secretary John Healey told BBC Breakfast [1:40:14] that a total of “around 39,000 have so far been brought in”.

The ARAP scheme closed to new applications on 1 July 2025, and on the same day the government also said there would be no new pathways through the ACRS. On 15 July, Mr Healey said the ARR had also closed to new applicants.

How much has the ARR cost?

On 15 July, the day news of the scheme broke, Mr Healey told Parliament “to date, 900 ARR principals are in Britain or in transit, together with 3,600 family members, at a cost of about £400 million”.

Mr Healey also said while from 15 July no new relocation offers would be made under the ARR scheme, 600 “invitations” which had already been made to “any named persons still in Afghanistan and their families” would still be honoured. Mr Healey said he expected the cost of relocating these individuals “to be a similar sum” to the £400 million, suggesting a cost of around £800 million for a total of approximately 1,500 ARR relocations and their families.

In an interview with BBC Breakfast on 16 July [1:39:19], Mr Healey said the cost of the ARR scheme “will total around £800, 850 million” and clarified that “the bigger figures that the newspapers are reporting and mixing up, to be quite honest, are the total costs of all the Afghan location schemes that the government set up and have been running.”

Journalist Lewis Goodall, one of the hosts of The News Agents podcast, which was one of the media outlets involved in the court case, has said that the £800 million figure for ARR resettlement “could well be an underestimate”, and that court documents and submissions suggested the figure could be higher.

What about the £7 billion figure?

According to the Times, the £7 billion figure was referenced by the government in a court document which said that the response to the data leak “would extend the scheme for another 5 years at a cost of c.£7 billion”.

When asked by shadow defence secretary James Cartlidge to confirm why the estimated cost of the ARR scheme was £400 million, “not the £7 billion reported elsewhere”, Mr Healey said the £7 billion figure was “a previous estimate” which appeared in court papers, and which “related not simply to the Afghan Response Route but [was] an estimate of the total cost of all government Afghan schemes for the entire period in which they may operate”.

The MOD similarly told the Times that the court document containing the £7 billion figure was “not clear” and that it referred to the combined cost of all Afghan schemes.

On 15 July, Mr Healey said “the total cost of all Afghan relocation schemes to date, for those 36,000 Afghans who have been brought to this country, is around £2.7 billion”, and that the “expected cost over the entire lifetime of those schemes … is between £5.5 billion and £6 billion”.

While this is lower than the previous estimate of £7 billion Mr Healey referred to, he said due to the government’s decision to close the ARR to new applicants and “the policy decisions that we have taken compared with simply continuing the policy and schemes that we inherited”, the overall cost of the schemes will be £1.2 billion less than it would have otherwise been as “around 9,500 fewer Afghans” will now come to the UK.