Speeches by Pollard.

“My assessment, broadly—without talking about individuals, because it is difficult for me to do so—is that I do not blame individual actions; I blame a system that was not set up to deliver the intended outcomes and was not comprehensive enough to access all the evidence and data that Defence held across our different s…”

“That might be one for Dominic.”

“As I said, I will not be able to talk about individual judgments, but the Defence Secretary set it out in a statement to Parliament, when he talked about not the actions of individuals, but a system that was not delivering.”

“I am not able to get ahead of any decisions that are taken. It is probably not right for me to comment on hypotheticals, as the Committee will appreciate. From what we have seen with the decisions taken here, I am not aware that there was any intent, malice or malign activity behind them. I can certainly see a system t…”

“My sense of this is, having inherited a situation where a number of parliamentarians were read on, that that work had already been done. Those people had already been read on. The legal application of the super-injunction had been applied to those individuals, and that was the current sense.”

“My message, very clearly, is that we will honour our obligation in full to eligible Afghans. This country, under both the previous Government and the current Government, has promised that we will honour that obligation. We have relocated 38,000 or so eligible Afghans to date, including key principal individuals and imm…”

“It is hard for me to comment on the actions of a particular individual, because I will not be able to talk about individuals and anything around special forces; the Committee will know that that is difficult for me as a Minister. Broadly, the Triples review was necessary, and it identified that decisions had been taken…”

“I am certainly not accountable for, or able to comment on, the decisions relating to the initial data breach, because that happened under the last Government. I am responsible for how we responded to it from July 2024 onwards. In doing so, from July 2024, we took a steady set of measures: stabilising the schemes, which…”

“It is perhaps worth Dominic saying how we communicated to the other agencies and other partners that we worked with. I have just spoken about how we communicated to the individuals on the dataset, but perhaps he could cover the other partners.”

“During that period, I wrote to the Leader of the Opposition, inviting her to be read on. As you will recall from the time, it took a wee while to get a response to that, but we read her on ahead of the lifting of the super-injunction. And, just at the point of lifting the super-injunction, as part of a managed briefing…”

“I was not shown a full list of the people in the compartment, but broadly there was an understanding that this was a tightly held restriction. It was not a departmental compartment, so to speak; it was one required by the courts in terms of the risk of it. We could not acknowledge either that it existed or the contents…”

“At the time, the new shadow Defence Secretary, James Cartlidge, was a read-on Minister from the previous Administration, so that effectively mirrored the arrangement under which John Healey had been read on in opposition.”

“Yes, what I am saying is that the previous Government had read on the Speaker and the Lord Speaker. In the event that a debate happened in the House of Commons, I think the previous Government made the decision, which I think was reasonable at the time, that in order to support the spirit of the super-injunction, there…”

“I do not think I have—on taking office, I have had no correspondence that I can recall from Grant Shapps at all, and that is not one that I am aware of.”

“When we took over and were made aware of the super-injunction, it was our sense that we needed to continue the spirit of the super-injunction due to the risk that, at the time, was applied to the individuals on the dataset. To be honest, it was pretty unpalatable for me as a parliamentarian, especially as someone who h…”

“The spirit of the super-injunction was that, due to the risk involved, only those individuals necessary for the protective action should be told about it. I was uncomfortable with the super-injunction; I think we all were in the Department—there was no one who was comfortable with this situation—and that led us, in tim…”

“Again, I will turn to Dominic for the details on that question, but broadly, on the basis of the Rimmer review that assessed a different level of risk, we were able to make a different decision around the risk, which enabled the Defence Secretary and me to agree to lift, or to apply to the court to lift, the super-inju…”

“I think you are referring to the TPL1 judgment, which found that it is clear that there was no evidence of bias or hidden motives on the part of the UKSF liaison officer in that respect.”

“We set out very clearly that the model for moving people ended the facilitation model of using a third party to do so. That is partly because we can see an increase in self-move already, and partly because we believe the risk profile of the cohort we are dealing with has now changed, based on the assessment in the Rimm…”

“Much of that information is held by other Government Departments, so we can see how that is going. The Home Office, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and their partners are responsible for that integration work. However, let’s see if we can collate some of that together, because there are powerf…”