Afghan migrants have brought as many as 22 family members to the UK after relatives previously rejected for asylum were allowed in following a military data breach.
The disclosure could raise fears that national security may have been compromised in the confusion that followed the most damaging data breach in British history..
Government sources say Afghans who were flown to Britain brought an average of eight family members with them, leaving officials scrambling to find accommodation for them.
Ministers were even forced to consider “knocking two houses into one” on military bases to accommodate individual families.
But the public was kept in the dark because of a super-injunction that was extended at Sir Grant Shapps’s direction shortly before last year’s general election.
Sir Grant has now been accused of “trying to rewrite history” after he claimed on Friday he was “surprised” that the super-injunction stayed in place for so long after it was granted in September 2023, when in truth he successfully appealed against a judge’s decision to lift it in May last year.
The Conservative government took action in 2023 when it learnt that a list of nearly 19,000 Afghans who had applied to come to Britain was wrongly shared by a defence official in 2022.
The Afghans, who included special forces soldiers, had applied through a scheme for those who had worked with or alongside the British Armed Forces during the war in Afghanistan, making them potential targets of the Taliban.
In March last year, the Government set up an emergency scheme, called the Afghanistan Response Route, to airlift people named in the data breach to the UK.
Whitehall sources have told The Telegraph that one person who came to the UK was allowed to bring 22 family members, while others were in the “high teens”.
Defence ministers had wanted to restrict arrivals to married couples and their children, but UK courts repeatedly expanded the eligibility criteria, citing the European Convention on Human Rights.
There was a dramatic change in the criteria last November, when High Court judge Mrs Justice Yip ruled, in a case brought against the Foreign Office by an Afghan already living in the UK, that family members did not have to have a blood or legal connection to the applicant.
Her ruling stated: “The term ‘family member’ does not have any fixed meaning in law or in common usage. Indeed, the word ‘family’ may mean different things to different people and in different contexts. There may be cultural considerations … there is no requirement for a blood or legal connection.”
Court documents previously kept secret by the super-injunction – which was finally lifted earlier this week – show that only 10 per cent of the extended family members that applicants wanted to bring to the UK had been deemed eligible under previously existing routes.
The document states: “Given the increased risk to some AFM [additional family members] as a result of the data incident, officials expect the number of applications and success rate to increase…
“Officials estimate that upwards of 55% of AFM will be eligible in light of the incident – up to approximately 12,500 AFM across all eligible cohorts.”
Only 2,200 of those people were deemed eligible previously, meaning Sir Grant was prepared to accept more than 10,000 who had been deemed ineligible.
Sources in Afghanistan have told The Telegraph that in the “chaos” that followed the data breach, criminals, including junior staff who had stolen from British bases and sold weapons to the Taliban, had come to the UK with large numbers of family members, while military commanders who served alongside the Army had been left behind.
The resettlement of Afghans in the UK led to major rows in Government, it emerged this week, as Cabinet ministers expressed concerns about the number of bogus claimants who could end up coming to the UK and the implications for national security.
Sir Grant was contacted for comment.
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