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Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle knew about Afghan data leak and should have made ministers tell MPs, Dame Harriet Harman has claimed.
Speaking to Beth Rigby on the Electoral Dysfunction podcast, the Labour peer said the Speaker – whose job she ran for in 2019 – should have asked for a key select committee to be made aware.
A spokesperson for the Speaker said he was “himself under a super-injunction” and so “would have been under severe legal restrictions”.
A massive data breach by the British military that was only made public this week exposed the personal information of close to 20,000 Afghan individuals, endangering them and their families.
Successive governments tried to keep the leak secret with a super-injunction, meaning the UK only informed everyone affected on Tuesday – three-and-a-half years after their data was compromised.
The breach occurred in February 2022, when Boris Johnson was prime minister, but was only discovered by the British military in August 2023.
A super-injunction, which prevented the reporting of the mistake, was imposed in September of that year.
The previous Conservative government set-up a secret scheme in 2023 – which can only now be revealed – to relocate Afghan nationals impacted by the data breach but who were not eligible for an existing programme to relocate and assist individuals who had worked for the British government in Afghanistan.
Some 6,900 Afghans – comprising 1,500 people named on the list as well as their dependents – are being relocated to the UK as part of this programme.
Dame Harriet said: “The Speaker was warned, ‘If somebody’s going to say something which breaches this injunction, will you please shut them up straight away if an MP does this’, and he agreed to do that.
“But what he should have done at the time is he should have said, but parliamentary accountability is important. I’m the Speaker. I’m going to stand up for parliamentary accountability. And you must tell the…
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