Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what recent assessment his Department has made of (a) trends in the levels of arms smuggling into Yemen from Iran and (b) the effectiveness of UNVIM in preventing arms smuggling,

We remain deeply concerned by the findings of the UN Panel of Experts on Yemen that missiles, and related military equipment of Iranian origin, were introduced into Yemen after the imposition of the targeted arms embargo. As the Panel concluded, this puts Iran in non-compliance with UN Security Council Resolution 2216 (2015) and reaffirms our concerns about destabilising Iranian activity in Yemen and the wider region. We call on Iran to cease such activity, which risks escalating the conflict, and to support a political solution to the conflict in Yemen.

The UK is providing £1.3 million to help the UN's Verification and Inspection Mechanism (UNVIM) to facilitate commercial imports into Hodeidah and Saleef ports by giving the Coalition confidence that weapons are not coming in on commercial ships. Alongside this financial support, we have also deployed UK experts to support the inspections of ships in Djibouti, increasing the proportion of physical inspections ten-fold.