Speeches by Pollard.

“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…”

“I will let Dominic talk about the broader exercise. We have put in place—as this Government rather than the previous Government—improvements to data protection, data handling and record keeping. That includes implementing new IT systems that would make it impossible to send entire datasets out from MOD systems. Previou…”

“Thank you for your opening remarks about the soldier we lost recently. That is much appreciated. It was immediately after becoming a Minister—I think it was 10 July 2024—when the super-injunction was disclosed to me, and I was read in on that injunction. In opposition, it was only the now Defence Secretary who was read…”

“No. What we have seen since the pausing of facilitated departure from Afghanistan, ahead of the lifting of the super-injunction, is a large increase in the number of people who are, in our parlance, self-moving. They are legally relocating themselves from Afghanistan to a third country, and we are providing support to …”

“I will turn to Dominic to give some of the detailed recommendations, but broadly it was apparent for those who were following the Triples over a number of years—before the Triples review started—that the data required to demonstrate that the Triples had indeed worked alongside UK forces in Afghanistan was not being cor…”

“My sense is that we have, yes. However, to answer your question fully and give you confidence on that, I will write to the Committee with the details, as per the Chair’s instruction earlier. We are not anticipating having operations in the same way as we have had in Afghanistan. However, we do work with partner forces …”

“It is not what he did, though, when he was in charge. Certainly, when we assumed office, having been briefed on the super-injunction and made aware of the other challenges affecting the ARAP scheme, our assessment in opposition was the one that I had immediately after coming into office: that it was a mess that needed …”

“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.”

“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 don’t believe that was necessarily the case. What I do think is that the whole system was not set up to deliver the correct eligibility decisions. That is because the eligibility decisions were not able to access the correct information required for doing so. We know that from the Triples review, because during the r…”

“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…”

“There is a proper investigation into those allegations, and the review is taking place at the High Court level. It is right for me to allow that to continue without commenting on what evidence may be presented. I am not able to second-guess anything that goes into it—nor do I want to. I am not using that as a defence i…”

“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…”

“I am happy for Dominic to come in on how we manage risk. The distinction that I would make, as the Minister responsible for it since July ’24, is different from the accountability of the Ministers and officials who were in charge of the scheme at the point of Op PITTING, the initial data breach, and the setting up of A…”

“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…”

“I am not privy to the decisions that the last Government made as to who they chose to read in on this.”

“It seems a fair challenge. I do not know precisely what happened under the last Government, because I was not a Minister at the time, so I will probably invite Dominic to comment on the detail of some of the instructions and the processes—”

“Yes, broadly. Since we made the decision around the pipeline, we have been able to close two hotels we were using for Afghan transitional accommodation: one in Scotland, and one in south Wales, which I believe closed only a few days ago. We have also been able to exit transitional accommodation from the Defence estate,…”

“That is right. In opposition, as the shadow Armed Forces Minister with responsibility for Afghans, I had raised a number of concerns around data and the handling of the Afghan scheme, but I was not aware of the super-injunction until I became a Minister.”

“I think that implementing the self-checker was an important moment, where individuals—including those people on the dataset and those who were part of the Afghan relocation scheme but were not on the dataset—were able to get reassurance: were they affected or were they not? That was the purpose of the self-checker. It …”