Animal Testing

Sarah Jones Excerpts

Wednesday 28th January 2026 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Policing and Crime (Sarah Jones)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Western. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles (Michael Wheeler), who has given us a powerful depiction of what happens when things go wrong. He highlighted the importance of making sure the Government ensure an oversight and licensing regime so that things do not go wrong. He touched on different areas of policy, to which I should respond. I will start with his stories of where things have gone wrong, the push for Herbie’s law, and how we go further and faster on the removal of animals from scientific testing.

We can all probably agree that we want to phase out the use of animals in science and the strategy that colleagues in other Departments have introduced to replace animals in science shows the direction of travel. There are calls to go further and faster and of course we will listen and work with colleagues on that.

[Irene Campbell]

I thank the Minister for giving way. The strategy is of course hugely welcome, but there are no timelines associated with much of the strategy. For it to work effectively and get us to where we need to be, we need timelines. Is there any indication of when timelines are likely to be made clear to us?

[Sarah Jones]

I will certainly take that question back to my colleagues who are implementing the strategy, and I have heard from other colleagues the call for a faster timeline. The science is developing, and my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles mentioned the transformational technology that we have and the opportunities for growth. We do not know the answer to some things because the science is not yet finished, but I hear the point about pushing for change as soon as possible.

The purpose of the strategy is to phase out animal testing. That is this Government’s ambition and intention. The relevant human alternatives that we want to replace it with have to continue to protect public health and product safety, and we have to be sure that replacements are able to do that. Uncomfortable though it is, we know that the use of animals in science has enabled us to develop medicines that we would not have been able to develop otherwise would. To replace that, we need to make sure that what comes afterwards is robust. It is everybody’s ambition to have a revolution in research and innovation in this country, and to build on that and use our expertise to make sure we go as fast as possible, but I hear the call for timelines and I will talk to my colleagues about how we try to do that. The strategy has a tiered approach to identify which animal test can be replaced soonest, and which are the easier ones to get done first. I very much hear the call for a timescale for a longer-term road map.

There is great public interest in making sure that we treat animals as they should be treated when they are used in research. My hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles talked a lot about the work of the regulator, and how we should take a robust approach to regulation. The regulator is overseen by the Home Office Minister Lord Hanson, who signed off on a package of reform to it last year, which my hon. Friend mentioned. My hon. Friend was slightly more dismissive of it than perhaps we would be, and I heard what he said, but there has been an increase in the number of people who are able to ensure oversight and a new focus through the reform programme. It has just begun, and we need to give it a bit of time to see whether it works more effectively. I hear loud and clear his calls for the Government to ensure that the regulator is as robust as it can be.

It might be useful to look at how the regulator currently works, and then we can work together going forward. I do not know if my hon. Friend has met the regulator, but it might be worth convening something with other interested MPs, to have a conversation about the reforms and where we think things will improve. The regulator is set up to prevent compliance breaches and investigate them. If non-compliance is confirmed, the regulator has a broad range of sanctions available. There is a conversation about whether it is using all those sanctions in the way that it could. The sanctions range in severity, and my hon. Friend mentioned those at the lower end, but the regulator does have more extensive powers to act.

It might be useful to have a conversation with the regulator about how we balance self-referral. Self-referrals often come in; we have very good and honourable people doing research and using the system as it should be used. I also hear the slight question about self-referral, and whether we are in the places that we need to be as much as we should be. There is a balance in the regulatory approach and how punitive the approaches can be. We want the sector to be open and transparent, so we have to get that balance right. I am sure that my hon. Friend understands that. If we are disproportionate—if that is a risk—then work gets offshored and goes elsewhere, where the systems are not anywhere near as powerful as they are in this country. We need to have proportionality in our approach to non-compliance.

We also need to understand that self-reporting is not a bad thing, but a good thing. We want a culture of care that is respectful of animals. Most incidents of non-compliance are self-reported, as I have said, and the decisions taken after that are then proportionate. Where there are more significant breaches, the sanctions are there, and we could have a conversation with the regulator about when those sanctions are imposed and when they are not.

I thank colleagues again for raising this issue. We have a strict and rigorous licensing regime, which I am partly responsible for, both for the 100-odd companies that are able to test on animals and the 13,000 individuals who have a licence to use animals in testing. The regulator is going through reform and has had its functions beefed up over the last year. We have an ambition as a Government to end the use of animals in science, but, as a Minister, I will always commit to push for more and will always listen to my colleagues for advice.

The good takeaways from this debate are that we need to understand where the regulator is coming from a bit more, what the balance is for proportionality, how we can all move forward, and, having heard the calls for more timeliness in ending the use of animals in testing, how we can work with colleagues across the Government to deliver that.

Question put and agreed to.