16 July 2025, 10:21

By Sir David Davis

One of the core principles of public life is openness.

Yet today we learn that, for two years, the Government concealed from Parliament a colossal and potentially unfunded spending commitment. That is not openness. It is a deliberate evasion of democratic scrutiny.

In February 2022, a serious data breach occurred, risking the lives of thousands of Afghans who had served with our armed forces.

The incident was triggered when a Royal Marine sent a spreadsheet to trusted Afghan colleagues. They thought the data included the details of 150 individuals who had applied for asylum here in the UK.

The intention was to check whether those applicants had genuinely served alongside British forces.

In actual fact, the file contained the names, contact details, and, in some cases, family members, of 18,714 Afghan asylum seekers, many of whom worked alongside British forces in Afghanistan.

The Ministry of Defence only became aware of the breach over a year later, when details of........

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