Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what steps he is taking to ensure emergency aid for civilians in Yemen is allowed through the Saudi-led blockade.

​The ongoing conflict makes humanitarian access and delivery of aid into and within Yemen extremely difficult. We urge all parties to the conflict to take all reasonable steps to allow and facilitate rapid, safe and unhindered humanitarian access, as called for in the two UN Security Council Presidential Statements that the UK sponsored and coordinated in June 2017 and March 2018. This has been a constant theme of our engagement with the Saudi authorities. The UK played a leading role in persuading the Saudi-led Coalition to ease access restrictions on Hodeidah and Saleef ports, imposed after a Houthi ballistic missile was launched at Riyadh on 4 November. During the recent visit to London of Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman, the UK and Saudi Arabia reaffirmed their commitment to work together to strengthen the inspection mechanism of the UN's Verification and Inspection Mechanism (UNVIM) to ensure that all Yemeni ports can remain fully open to commercial and humanitarian supplies. The UK is providing £1.3 million this financial year to UNVIM, and has deployed UK maritime experts to Djibouti to boost the inspections process. This is helping to increase the proportion of ships physically inspected almost ten-fold (from 8 per cent to 77 per cent).