Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what progress his Department is making on reducing the use of animals in experiments and replacing such experiments with machine learning.

The Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 requires project licence holders to ensure that their programme of work does not involve any regulated procedures for which there is a scientifically satisfactory alternative method or testing strategy that does not entail the use of a protected animal.

The government is committed to the replacement, reduction, and refinement of the use of animals in research - the ‘3Rs’. Implementing the 3Rs requires that, in every research proposal, animals are replaced with non-animal alternatives wherever possible; that the number of animals is reduced to the minimum needed to achieve the results sought; and that, for those animals which must be used, procedures are refined as much as possible to minimise their suffering.