Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what the reason is for the changes planned to resource expenditure on community rail and research and freightliner lease in 2015-16.

It is important that community rail receives increased financial support to allow Community Rail Partnerships (CRPs) and the rail industry to improve local rail services, stations and thereby deliver excellent passenger benefits for local people and visitors.

Recent research has shown that CRPs and station adopters are delivering real economic and social benefits for the communities they serve.

We will work to put CRPs on a more sustainable footing thorough the government's franchising programme. This will see community rail funding requirements written in to more franchising agreements in future. Though our budgets for 2015 - 2016 are still to be finalised we expect that we will be uplifting the grant we pay to Association of Community Rail Partnerships (ACoRP) so that they can better support CRPs and station adopters.

With regard to our planned expenditure on freightliner lease and research we are expecting no material change.