Speeches by Williams.

“That is a cross-Government review. I can send you a note on the MOD response to those recommendations. Some of them were for Departments, and some for the Cabinet Office and the centre. I can give data on our share of them, if that is helpful.”

“It is a feature of running a complex and large organisation such as the MOD that there will be accidental data breaches from time to time. We report the overall number in the annual report and accounts, and that will be updated when the accounts come out this autumn. I am happy to share some detail on the 49 that were …”

“This comes back to the unprecedented nature of the circumstances in which we were operating. I am not aware of Government ever having been party to a super-injunction before.”

“No, not that would meet the threshold for notification.”

“These are the debates that we are currently having.”

“The risk of data loss was clearly something that we had identified. As part of that departmental error, I agree that that risk was not managed appropriately.”

“Yes, there are.”

“The Government’s position is that they currently plan to defend compensation claims robustly in the courts, so we will see where we come out on that, which will factor that into our judgments about financial provision.”

“That will be a live issue with the Comptroller and Auditor General between now and publication of my accounts for 2024-25.”

“I certainly do not want to sound complacent, but, if you are suggesting that paying £475 a day is the counterbalancing issue here, it is a rather more complex issue than that.”

“As yet, nothing.”

“To clarify, that overall figure from me is the combination of the ARAP scheme, the Afghan citizen resettlement scheme that was run by the Home Office, and our Afghan response route.”

“There were a range of risks that we were looking to manage. As I have tried to explain, we had a range of policies in place that, in theory, would deal with these issues. We did not have the right systems support or training in place—and we have improved that since—in an operational context in which individuals were wo…”

“As I said in my introduction, having established the ARAP route against some challenging operational imperatives, the systems that we use, a SharePoint site and Excel spreadsheets, are not the tools that you need to use for handling confidential data of this sort on this scale. In bringing responsibility for the resett…”

“My point is that we did respond to the incidents from autumn 2021, but the nature of those incidents was different from the one that happened in February 2022. Once that breach became known to us, we ran a much more fundamental review of our data protection and information handling, both contributing to a cross-Governm…”

“What we have said is that the full cost to Government overall to date, or at least the costs that will be incurred for those individuals to whom offers have been made since we started the process of relocation, is about £2.7 billion. The full cost overall could be around double that.”

“I am not sure that I accept that we will necessarily have to pay that premium, but there is not a cost in that £850 million for future operations. It is about the cost of completing this resettlement scheme.”

“Five of them relate to the use of “to” versus the blind copy or “bcc” field. One relates to an incorrect link to an online portal. The seventh and last notification to the ICO is the data breach from February 2022.”

“Immediately after the breach became known to us in August 2023, one of the early bodies that we contacted was the Metropolitan Police to see if it had been a deliberate or a criminal act, and its assessment was that this was accidental.”

“I do not really want to go further than the Secretary of State and his statement to the House in saying that it was a defence official.”