Select committee: Public Accounts Committee
Conclusion 19
54th Report - Afghanistan Response Route
Published 14 Nov 2025
Addressed to HM Treasury
Public Accounts Committee Afghanistan Response Route (ARR) All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Conclusion (the committee's words)
The data breach was also not reported in the MoD’s Annual Report and Accounts for 2023–24. The Comptroller & Auditor General, who is an officer of the House of Commons, is responsible for the audit of these accounts, which is carried out by his staff at the National Audit Office (NAO).48 The Department said it was accounting for all of the spend on the ARR in the way that it was accounting for the public Afghan relocations and assistance policy spend. It took the judgment that it would not ‘read in’ the C&AG at that point.49 The Permanent Secretary commented that, “In the 2023–24 accounts, my sense was that, at that point, there was nothing material that the Comptroller and Auditor General needed to know about, but it may well be that the Comptroller and Auditor General will come to a different view as we finalise the accounts for 2024–25”.50 In correspondence received after our evidence session the Permanent Secretary stated that he took the decision not to inform the C&AG in the knowledge of the Ministerial position on reading in Parliamentarians and because he judged it would extend the circle of knowledge without offering an opportunity for meaningful scrutiny while the super-injunction was in place.51
From: Public Accounts Committee, 54th Report - Afghanistan Response Route (HC 1391), 14 November 2025
Government response
Latest Treasury Minutes progress report to the Committee of Public Accounts on the Fifty-fourth Report of Session 2024-26
The government responded to the whole report on 4 June 2026 (deadline 14 January 2026).
Treasury minutes: Government response to the Committee of Public Accounts on the Fifty-fourth report from Session 2024-26
Published 19 January 2026.
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government agrees with four of the Committee's recommendations, including six-monthly updates on ARR resettlement from March 2026, and disagrees with the recommendation on separately capturing ARR costs.
- On updates, the government agrees to write to the Committee every six months from March 2026 until the ARR is complete, though it "may not always be possible to provide a precise breakdown by scheme".
- On the case working system, it agrees, stating the recommendation is implemented and that DACS (introduced in May 2022) addressed "many of the vulnerabilities", with the department "equipped with the right tools to minimise the risk" of a recurrence.
- On scrutiny, it agrees and gives a target date of Spring 2026. The Treasury will issue a Dear Accounting Officer letter on sharing information with the Comptroller and Auditor General in the event of a super-injunction.
- It disagrees on separate ARR costing, saying this would be "disproportionately complex and resource intensive", and instead offers an indicative cost allocation at the end of each financial year, included with the six-monthly updates.