Parliament recently held a debate on the use of animals in testing which I spoke in. In 1986, this country introduced the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act. At the time, it was seen as world-leading and as the gold standard, with its three Rs principles: to replace animal testing wherever possible; to reduce animal testing where it was not possible to replace it; and to refine it to reduce suffering where it occurred.
However, it is increasingly clear that a review of the legislation is now needed. We have always been ahead of the United States on animal welfare issues, but this is one area where, arguably, we have now fallen behind them. Until recently, the US required animal testing for certain product authorisations, but it has now brought forward legislation to modernise its statute.
To give credit where credit is due, is important to note that the Government effectively banned the use of animal testing in the development of cosmetics in 2023. That followed the huge progress made by companies such as Unilever and others to phase out the need for animal testing on their products. However, the greatest concern for me is that despite exponential growth in non-animal methods and huge leaps in that technology over 20 years the number of animals used in animal tests remains stubbornly high, at around 4 million a year, mainly mice.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that what started out in 1986 as a robust regime has probably drifted and coalesced into a rather unsatisfactory system of self-regulation. We have to ask ourselves why those three Rs principles are not being effectively applied. Ultimately, I think it is because everybody defers to process, but no one really takes proper ownership. We have ended up with cultural attitudes around the use of animals in scientific procedures that masquerade as science, when actually the science does not require those animals to be used in such numbers at all.
There is too much deference afforded to ethics committees at universities. In some ways, it feels quite incongruous to have to put a monetary value on the life of a mouse to get people to take it seriously, but if researchers are not taking the intrinsic value of that mouse’s life as seriously as they should, let us consider some other incentives that might reinforce the original three Rs. One idea I floated to that we consider applying a levy on the use of each individual animal in testing, as part of the project licence. A levy of £100 or £200 for each mouse used as part of the project licence might focus minds.
I think everyone will welcome the significant increase in funding that the Government has pledged to support research on non-animal methods, but this needs to be matched with a program that reinforces and reestablishes the three R’s firmly back on the agenda.
