Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what steps the Government is taking to encourage the growth of new rail technologies, including hydrogen-powered trains.

The Department for Transport provides total funding of £70.6m per year which is dedicated to research, development and innovation in the rail industry, as well as additional investment in targeted major modernisation projects such as smart ticketing and digital signalling. Funding for general research and innovation includes projects to support the development of hydrogen-powered trains, with projects researching how they will be approved for entering service, as well as enabling the first mainline testing of a hydrogen train.

The Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) funds, with industry, a network of university-based centres of excellence for rail research and innovation, as well as committing £11m to a dedicated centre at the University of Leeds. BEIS also offers Industrial Strategy challenge funds for which the rail industry can bid; and has recently announced £40m to explore how the use of hydrogen can be rolled out across the UK, and £100m to enable greater supply of low carbon hydrogen for use across the economy. These funding opportunities will be important to enable hydrogen-powered trains to run on the network in the future.