Ruth Jones

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship today, Mr Twigg. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Irene Campbell) for introducing this debate on behalf of the Petitions Committee. She is a fantastic, tireless champion of the rights of animals and does a great job chairing the APPG on phasing out animal experiments, of which I am proud to be a member. I also thank the 211 constituents in Newport West and Islwyn who signed this petition to end animal testing. The fact that the Public Gallery is so full today is testament to how important this subject is to so many across the UK. We have already heard that the number of procedures in 2024 was some 2.6 million, just 2% lower than the preceding year. Although 2024 marked the lowest number of scientific procedures involving living animals since 2001, the pace of reduction is far too slow. Britain, as we have already heard, is proudly badged as a nation of animal lovers and a world leader in animal welfare, but it is critical that we do not rest on our laurels. Indeed, continued leadership requires urgent commitments on further reforms to the regulatory, licensing and inspection regime governing the use of animals in science on the UK. I aim to touch on each of those areas in my speech —but I will be brief, as I can see the Chair’s eyebrows raising. I first turn to regulation. I greatly welcome the Labour Government’s new “Replacing animals in science” strategy, and their clear ambition for phasing out basket grouping of unnecessary tests on animals in the near future. I particularly support funding for a new UK centre for the validation of alternative methods and investment in non-animal method technologies. Although the strategy is detailed and comprehensive, I still believe that there are areas where we can go further. Embedding the targets to phase out routine tests prioritised as part of baskets 1 and 2 in law would provide absolute certainty to both the scientific community and campaigners of our commitment to end the use of animals in testing. Such a step could also bring in wider investment in UK scientific research, strengthening our position as a global leader in the development of animal-free testing methods. I therefore urge the Minister to commit to introducing Herbie’s law and enshrining the targets committed to in the recent strategy in legislation. I turn to licensing, which I have raised previously in Westminster Hall debates. I continue to believe that the Animals in Science Regulation Unit needs urgent reform. One of the key roles of the ASRU is administering the licensing regime created by ASPA. That is critical to reducing the number of animals used in scientific testing, as the Act already requires proactive consideration of the three Rs framework: replacing, reducing and refining the use of animals in such experiments. That is supposed to ensure that animals are used only as a last resort, but the embedding of the approach needs strengthening. That was a key reflection of the Rawle report, published in 2023, which voiced concerns that the welfare inspection regime risked embedding a focus on “box-ticking” rather than ensuring a culture of genuine commitment to advancing the three Rs. I greatly welcome the Government recognition of the need to strengthen the ethical review approval process to ensure that animals are used only where there is no alternative in line with the findings of the Rawle report. I therefore ask the Minister to report on the progress being made by his Department in strengthening the application of the three Rs following the publication of the Animals in Science Committee’s January report, and in advance of its forthcoming report in September. Of particular importance is strengthening the ASRU’s understanding of the rapid developments in non-animal methods—NAMs. That is essential to ensuring that the application of the three Rs is effective and in line with international best practice, such as that now being implemented by the US Food and Drug Administration as part of its road map. It is interesting that the US is now ahead of us in this area. I urge the Minister that we need to get back on top here. Responsibility for driving this change sits directly with Ministers, with statutory duties to assess for the three Rs—particularly replacement, which sits with the Home Secretary. As such, Ministers must drive the necessary reform of the ASRU, ensuring that it has the expertise to effectively and independently verify whether applications have been appropriately evaluated against NAMs. The ASRU has typically been composed of vets, who unfortunately, given the fast-moving nature of the field, do not always have up-to-date expertise in modern NAMs, including organs on chips and computational biology. Those handling applications need to be well versed in those technologies and able to engage in critical questions around scientific methodologies and data validation, rather than reliant on a replacement checklist. ASPA requires that scientifically satisfactory NAMs are used “wherever possible”. Given that, and the section 2A duties on the Home Secretary—I appreciate that is a different Department—I ask the Minister what steps they are taking to improve the training and expertise available to ASRU inspectors to allow them to effectively and independently verify application compliance with ASPA. Of particular concern are tests taken under the so-called “generic” project licences as highlighted by Animal Aid and Animals International. Those licences are granted without knowing the substances being tested, and as such, a harm-benefit analysis cannot have been done. I therefore ask the Minister what specific steps he is taking to review “generic” project licences to avoid unnecessary harm and strengthen application of the three Rs. I appreciate that relates to a different Department, but I am sure that his Department will be working in lockstep with the Home Office, so I look forward to the response. Turning to enforcement, adherence to ASPA within licensed premises also continues to be a site of significant concern. The latest annual report from the ASRU made extremely grim reading. The 146 reported cases of non-compliance with legal requirements of licensing conditions highlight an ongoing failure to prevent appalling animal suffering in laboratories. That includes extreme cases of animals drowning or starving to death. In total, those cases detail the suffering of more than 22,000 animals. Those numbers are significant, but unfortunately they only reflect breaches self-reported to the ASRU. My fear is that the numbers are far greater than those documented. That only underlines the importance of an effective inspection regime and promoting a proactive culture of safeguarding animal welfare. Despite the ASRU issuing more than 15,000 licences in 2024, at the end of that year, the ASRU had only 8.2 full-time equivalent inspectors. That means that just 68 establishments were inspected in 2024, with only 10 of those inspections being unannounced. I therefore welcome commitments made by the Government to increase the number of veterinary and medical inspectors working for the ASRU, and I would be grateful if the Minister could confirm whether the Government have been successful in recruiting to meet the previously stated target of 22 inspectors by March this year. In closing, the continued testing on animals demands moral leadership. That requires urgent implementation of the replacing animals in science strategy, strengthening enforcement of ASPA, and using Britain’s unique position as a global leader in animal welfare and pharmaceuticals to chart a global path towards ending animal testing once and for all. I thank the Petitions Committee for bringing this debate to Westminster Hall, and I urge the Minister to go faster in eradicating animal testing. The public is impatient and wants change quickly, and so do we.