Person responsible for MoD data breach should lose their job, Penny Mordaunt believes

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By Danielle Desouza

Penny Mordaunt has said the person behind the MoD data breach should lose their job to show that the incident was "wrong".

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Speaking to LBC’s Tonight with Andrew Marr, Ms Mordaunt, who previously served as the Secretary of State for Defence said: "The reason why it's important that we do right by the interpreters [is] that we want to demonstrate to people who might be partners in the future that we can be trusted, that they can work with us in this way.

"The same argument applies to somebody that might still be doing things in the MoD. This is about restoring trust and confidence so I don't think that that person should be employed by the MoD.

"I think this is in part... about resetting this and saying this is wrong, we need to have trust and confidence about going forward."

As LBC first reported, a dataset containing the personal information of nearly 19,000 people who applied for the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (Arap) was released "in error" in February 2022.

More than 18,000 applicants were affected, with names and contact details, email addresses and phone numbers leaked. When family members are included, the number of people potentially put at risk rises to around 100,000.

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It is understood that an unnamed official had emailed the dataset outside of a secure government system while attempting to verify information, believing the dataset to only have around 150 rows.

However, there were more than 33,000 rows of information which were inadvertently sent.

Ms Mordaunt added parliamentary scrutiny should have happened in this instance.

"The other thing I'm thinking about is parliamentary scrutiny and I have long advocated that we have a particular committee in parliament called the intelligence and security committee, which is confidential - it's not in the public domain, and it has people on it which are senior people - very trusted - and it tends to take evidence from our intelligence agencies," she said.

"For certain things like special forces operations and things which are highly confidential but you would want parliament to know about them but they can't be discussed on the floor of the house that that committee ought to scrutinise some of these things.

"One of the disturbing elements of this, and there are many, is that parliament was not cited on this at all, and I think a bit of parliamentary scrutiny often helps keep governments honest about what they're doing and allows a bit of scrutiny as to question why they're taking particular courses of action."

Exclusive: Media gagged over MoD leak that put 100k Afghan allies at risk

An unprecedented superinjunction was made at the High Court in September 2023 to reduce the risk of alerting the Taliban to the existence of the data, with the decision to apply for an order made by then-defence secretary Ben Wallace.

The Information Commissioner's Office and Metropolitan Police were also informed.

The superinjunction, lifted on Tuesday, is thought to be the longest lasting order of its kind and the first time the Government has sought such a restrictive measure against the media.

At multiple hearings, lawyers for the MoD said in written submissions that there was a "very real risk that people who would otherwise live will die" if the Taliban gained access to the data.

However, a recent report by retired civil servant Paul Rimmer said: "Given the data they already have access to as the de facto government, we believe it is unlikely the dataset would be the single, or definitive, piece of information enabling or prompting the Taliban to act."

Mr Rimmer further found that the Government possibly "inadvertently added more value to the dataset" by seeking the unprecedented superinjunction and creating a bespoke resettlement scheme.

Under plans set out last October, the Afghanistan Response Route was expected to allow up to 25,000 people - most of whom were ineligible for Arap but deemed to be at the highest risk from Taliban reprisals - to be relocated.

One internal Government document from February this year said: "This will mean relocating more Afghans to the UK than have been relocated under the Arap scheme, at a time when the UK's immigration and asylum system is under significant strain. This will extend the scheme for another five years at a cost of c. £7 billion."

However, the resettlement schemes are closing, with the review suggesting that the Afghanistan Response Route may be "disproportionate" to the impact of the Taliban obtaining the information.

As of March 2025, around 36,000 people had been relocated to the UK under Arap and other resettlement schemes.

Arap, which was launched in April 2021, is now closed to new applicants after immigration rule changes were laid in Parliament earlier this month.

The Government had originally outlined plans to launch a compensation scheme for those affected by the breach, with an estimated cost of between £120 and £350 million, not including administration expenses.

Hundreds of data protection legal challenges are also expected, with the court previously told that a Manchester-based law firm already had several hundred prospective clients.

The breach can now be reported after a High Court judge lifted the superinjunction - which prohibited making any reference to the existence of the court proceedings and is thought to have been the longest and widest ranging of its kind - on Tuesday.

In one of several rulings, judge Mr Justice Chamberlain noted the superinjunction "imposed very wide-ranging restrictions", with information about the breach limited to selected officials.

In a decision in November 2023, Mr Justice Chamberlain said while the superinjunction did not constrain what could be said in Parliament, "MPs and peers cannot ask questions about something they do not know about".

The judge ruled in May 2024 that the order should be lifted, stating there was a "significant possibility" the Taliban knew about the dataset, adding it was "fundamentally objectionable" that decisions about thousands of people's lives and "enormous sums of public money now being committed" were being taken in secret.

However, judges at the Court of Appeal overturned this ruling the following month, finding that he had not properly considered the consequences of lifting the order and that the superinjunction should stay in place.

Following the retired civil servant's review, the MoD agreed on July 4 that the order could be lifted.

It is expected that the cost of seeking and maintaining the superinjunction will be several million pounds.