Question to the Department for Business and Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, what recent assessment she has made of the (a) adequacy and (b) transparency of the arms export control regime.

HM Government takes its export control responsibilities very seriously and we operate one of the most robust and transparent export control regimes in the world.

We rigorously assess every application on a case-by-case basis against the Strategic Export Licensing Criteria (the Criteria). The Criteria provide a thorough risk assessment framework and we will not issue an export licence to any destination where to do so would be inconsistent with the Criteria.

Export licensing is the responsibility of the Export Control Joint Unit (ECJU), which brings together operational and policy expertise from the Department for Business and Trade (DBT), the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

We publish comprehensive Official Statistics every quarter about the decisions we make on licence applications including those issued, refused, rejected, or revoked. This covers data from every year since January 2008, and is broken down in a variety of ways, including by licence type, outcome, end user destination(s), initial processing time and control entry type. This data is available at: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/strategic-export-controls-licensing-data.