Asked by: Imran Hussain (Labour - Bradford East)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment her Department has made of the potential merits of providing funding to the National Vehicle Crime Intelligence Service to support the expansion of its operations in areas with high levels of vehicle crime.
Answered by Sarah Jones - Minister of State (Home Office)
The National Vehicle Intelligence Service (NaVCIS) is a national policing unit funded by industry, including finance and leasing companies, insurers and hauliers, to provide dedicated specialist intelligence and enforcement. NAVICS undertakes enforcement action at ports which are intelligence-led operations to tackle vehicle crime.
Whilst the Government does not fund NaVCIS, we provided £250,000 last year to other law enforcement partners to help support enforcement at the ports to prevent stolen vehicles and vehicle parts being shipped abroad, including additional staff and specialist equipment.
This Government is determined to drive down vehicle crime. We are working with the automotive industry and police, including the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead on the issue, to ensure the strongest response possible. The former Policing Minister recently met the previous NPCC vehicle crime lead, ACC Jenny Sims, as well as other law enforcement representatives and representatives from industry, to discuss how we work together to tackle these damaging crimes.
Via the recently established National Vehicle Crime Reduction Partnership and the police-led National Vehicle Crime Working Group, we are focusing on prevention and deterrence of theft of and from vehicles. This includes training police officers on the methods used to steal vehicles, encouraging vehicle owners to secure their vehicles, and working with industry to address vulnerabilities in vehicles.
In the Crime and Policing Bill we have banned electronic devices used to steal vehicles, empowering the police and courts to target the criminals using, manufacturing, importing and supplying them.
Asked by: Imran Hussain (Labour - Bradford East)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how much funding his Department plans to provide to children’s hospices after the 2025-26 financial year.
Answered by Stephen Kinnock - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
We want a society where every child receives high-quality, compassionate care from diagnosis through to the end of life.
We are supporting the hospice sector with a £100 million capital funding boost for eligible adult and children’s hospices in England to ensure they have the best physical environment for care. We are also providing £26 million of revenue funding to support children and young people’s hospices for 2025/26. This is a continuation of the funding which until recently was known as the children and young people’s hospice grant.
In 2024/25 and 2025/26, this funding was administered via ICBs in line with National Health Service devolution. We cannot yet confirm what the funding for 2026/27 will be, or how it will be administered.
Asked by: Imran Hussain (Labour - Bradford East)
Question to the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero:
To ask the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, what plans his Department has to for hydrogen-related funding in (a) Bradford East constituency and (b) West Yorkshire, in the context of his Department's Net Zero Strategy.
Answered by Sarah Jones - Minister of State (Home Office)
The UK Government is committed to supporting the growth of the hydrogen economy through its Hydrogen Allocation Rounds (HARs). In the first hydrogen allocation round (HAR1), announced in December 2023, 11 projects were selected to receive over £2 billion in revenue support for green hydrogen production. Additionally, £90 million in capital grant funding was awarded, with the potential to create up to 760 new jobs.
This includes Bradford Low Carbon Hydrogen, located in Bradford city centre, which will produce hydrogen for diggers and buses. Published subsidy award details for this project include a Direct Grant of £13 million and £396 million under the Hydrogen Production Business Model. The exact amount of funding will depend on the hydrogen produced at the site over a 15 year period.
Asked by: Imran Hussain (Labour - Bradford East)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to support community-based knife crime prevention programmes in Bradford.
Answered by Diana Johnson - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
Halving knife crime over the next decade is a key part of the Government’s Safer Streets Mission. Driving down youth-related violence across the UK, including in Bradford, will play a key role in meeting this ambition.
Through the Young Futures Programme, the Government will introduce Prevention Partnerships across the country, including in West Yorkshire, to intervene earlier and ensure that children and young people vulnerable to being drawn into crime are identified and offered support in a more systematic way.
As we design the Young Futures Programme, we will ensure that it learns from and builds on the work of the Violence Reduction Units (VRUs). VRUs bring together partners, including from the voluntary and community sector, to understand and tackle the drivers of serious violence in their area.
In 2025/26 the Home Office is investing over £4.3m in grant funding to the West Yorkshire VRU, alongside £169k to continue the implementation of the Serious Violence Duty. This funding will support delivery of a range of early intervention and prevention programmes.
Asked by: Imran Hussain (Labour - Bradford East)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps her Department is taking to expand access to community-based rehabilitation services.
Answered by Nicholas Dakin - Vice Chamberlain (HM Household) (Whip, House of Commons)
The Probation Service will receive up to £700 million more by 2028/29, a 45 percent increase on current spending. It will see tens of thousands more offenders tagged, monitored and rehabilitated. We are currently in the process of re-procuring our commissioned rehabilitative services contracts. Our new contracts will improve on our current offering with expanded and improved consistency of service availability in both custody and community. However, decisions on the future scale of accessibility to these services will be determined by departmental funding allocation decisions following the Spending Review.
Asked by: Imran Hussain (Labour - Bradford East)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what recent assessment her Department has made of trends in the level of (a) staffing and (b) caseloads in the probation service.
Answered by Nicholas Dakin - Vice Chamberlain (HM Household) (Whip, House of Commons)
This Government inherited a justice system in crisis, but we are gripping the situation and have taken immediate action. Both staffing levels and caseload are regularly monitored and analysed, and we remain committed to providing manageable workloads for staff. Recruitment and retention, along with our long-term plans for a sustainable Probation Service through targeting the most vital work are a priority.
Following recent recruitment campaigns the Probation Service has seen an increase in staffing levels (from 20,412 FTE to 21,022 FTE between March 2024 and March 2025). We are committed to onboarding 1,300 trainee Probation Officers in 2025/26, in addition to the 1,057 onboarded in 2024/25, and have secured £8 million in the Spring Statement to invest in new technology for front line staff.
Asked by: Imran Hussain (Labour - Bradford East)
Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, how much of the UK humanitarian aid budget has been spent on projects relating to support for Rohingya in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, since 2020.
Answered by Catherine West
The UK is a leading donor to the Rohingya response. We have provided over £126.7 million to support the Rohingya and host communities since 2020, including food provision, clean water, healthcare and protection services. UK funding is providing support to the refugees in the main refugee camp at Cox's Bazar, delivered by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the World Food Programme, the International Organisation for Migration and other agencies that work on refugee issues. We will continue to work closely with UN agencies and the Interim Government of Bangladesh to support the Rohingya and provide basic services.
Asked by: Imran Hussain (Labour - Bradford East)
Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:
To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, whether his Department plans to take steps to improve (a) knowledge transfer and (b) applied AI research through regional university-business partnerships.
Answered by Feryal Clark
Government is investing up to £500 million in the Local Innovation Partnerships Fund, a new programme to grow high potential innovation clusters across the UK. This will empower local partnerships of government, universities and businesses to decide how to target R&D investment in their region and unleash their full innovation potential. Alongside this, UKRI continues to support knowledge transfer and AI adoption through consortia of universities and local businesses across the UK. Investments such as the AI research hubs, AI centres for doctoral training and flagship BridgeAI programme are already catalysing local partnerships and driving local innovation and prosperity.
Asked by: Imran Hussain (Labour - Bradford East)
Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:
To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what plans his Department has to support university-led innovation programmes that boost (a) AI capacity and (b) research and development activity activity in partnership with local businesses in (i) West Yorkshire and (ii) other regional economies.
Answered by Feryal Clark
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) plays a crucial role incentivising collaboration and knowledge exchange between universities and other sectors and has supported numerous high-impact collaborations in artificial intelligence. For example, Higher Education Innovation Funding supports engagement with the space industry through the University of Bradford’s Bradford-Renduchintala Centre for Space AI.
UKRI also supports partnerships between universities and businesses through opportunities like Knowledge Transfer Partnerships and consortia investments such as the AI research hubs, AI centres for doctoral training and the flagship BridgeAI programme, catalysing local partnerships and driving local innovation and prosperity.
The AI Action Plan emphasises building a robust AI ecosystem that supports research, skills development, and business engagement, and at Spending Review £2 billion was allocated to implement the Action Plan.
Asked by: Imran Hussain (Labour - Bradford East)
Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:
To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what recent steps his Department has taken to strengthen collaboration between (a) higher education institutions and (b) local SMEs in the field of AI research and commercialisation in West Yorkshire.
Answered by Feryal Clark
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) plays a crucial role incentivising collaboration and knowledge exchange between universities and other sectors and has supported numerous high-impact collaborations in artificial intelligence. For example, Higher Education Innovation Funding supports engagement with the space industry through the University of Bradford’s Bradford-Renduchintala Centre for Space AI.
UKRI also supports partnerships between universities and businesses through opportunities like Knowledge Transfer Partnerships and consortia investments such as the AI research hubs, AI centres for doctoral training and the flagship BridgeAI programme, catalysing local partnerships and driving local innovation and prosperity.
The AI Action Plan emphasises building a robust AI ecosystem that supports research, skills development, and business engagement, and at Spending Review £2 billion was allocated to implement the Action Plan.