London

Britain's system of regulating animal experiments — one of the toughest in the world — has become far too bureaucratic, says a report due to be released by a House of Lords select committee this week.

The Lords charge that current government funds for researching alternatives to animal experimentation are “meagre”, saying that more should be done to promote such methods.

Calling animals “highly imperfect models”, but acknowledging the necessity of their continued use in research, the committee also recommends that the public should get more information about what animal experiments are done, and why.

The report, which was written by the Select Committee on Animals in Scientific Procedures, advocates reducing the length of the forms needed to acquire a typical licence for animal experimentation from a minimum of 40 pages down to about 10 pages.

“There is too much bureaucracy, which hampers scientific research and can even harm animal welfare,” says Lord Smith of Clifton, a professor of politics and the committee's chairman. He adds that the Home Office's annual budget of £280,000 (US$438,000) to promote the reduction, refinement and replacement of animal experiments is “hopelessly inadequate”. The committee calls for more money and a new national centre to serve as a focus for this work.

It is not unusual for select committee reports to gather dust in London after publication, but researchers are optimistic that this latest document will generate a response from the government — especially given the depth of the inquiry that preceded it, the government's strong public support for science, and the trouble that scientists are currently experiencing with animal regulations.

Biologists welcomed the committee's call for less arduous regulation. “It is right that the public has assurance of high standards,” says Richard Morris of the University of Edinburgh, who uses transgenic mice to develop models of Alzheimer's disease, “but scientists doubt the necessity for regulation to be accompanied by such cumbersome bureaucracy.”

Morris says that because of the regulations it is currently “almost impossible” for biomedical researchers in Britain to collaborate with foreign scientists “without flying them in months ahead to sit examinations and secure licences”.

But Gill Langley, a biologist who works as a scientific adviser to the Dr Hadwen Trust for Humane Research in Hitchin, north of London, says that the Lords should have focused more strongly on the need to find alternatives to animal experiments. She says that the committee should have proposed a centre dedicated entirely to replacing animals, akin to the European Centre for the Validation of Alternative Methods in Ispra, Italy.

The report also observes that the inclusion of all transgenic animals in government statistics on animal experiments — whether they are actually being experimented on or not — is artificially inflating these statistics.