Public Order Act 2023 (Interference With Use or Operation of Key National Infrastructure) Regulations 2025

Lord Willetts Excerpts

Wednesday 4th February 2026 Lords Chamber

Some of the accounts of what goes in the site that provoked this statutory instrument are very harrowing and there is no doubt that we should know more about it. Liberal Democrats support repealing Section 24 of the Animal (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 to improve public access to information. We need transparency to debate properly what is being done in the public interest that is unnecessary, cruel and inhumane. However, in the end, whether noble Lords vote for the fatal amendment depends on whether they feel it matters that the Government take us for fools, or that legislation passed in your Lordships’ House should say what it means.

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, referred in her powerful speech to what she called the “revulsion” against the use of animals in medical experiments. That is why there has been a long-term strategy, reinforced by this Government but also pursued by previous Governments, of the so-called “three Rs”: the reduction, replacement and refinement of the use of animals in medical experiments. That is the right thing to do and I am optimistic that new technologies will make it possible to make much more progress in that direction.

However, meanwhile, we have to engage with the world as it is, and some of the most important features of the world as it is—which have not yet been referred to by noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett—are the international standards on pharmaceuticals and drugs, many of which require that, before a drug is tested on a human, it should first have been tested on a rodent and a non-rodent. That is the legal regulatory environment within which all life science companies currently operate. It means that the production, export and import of large amounts of medical treatments—pharmaceuticals—have to comply with that international agreement, to which most countries, including the UK, have subscribed. I did not hear the Green Party say that it thought we should withdraw from that international agreement.

Therefore, if animals, both rodents and non-rodents, are to be used before a drug is tested on a human, we need a supply of those rodents and non-rodents. As Science Minister, I saw the extraordinary range of activities by protesters going way beyond the normal human right to protest, which of course we must support, and designed to make it impossible for the UK life sciences industry to comply with the international regulation to which we were all committed. Compliance with that regulation is necessary for our wider access to drugs and capacity to innovate and produce new drugs.

There has been discussion of national infrastructure, as if somehow we are talking about provisions that would immediately be applied to every pharmacist or every life science lab. What is actually shocking, when you look at it close up, is how we are dependent on a very narrow range and extraordinarily small number of facilities to enable us to comply with those international requirements. If we were to lose those, it would not be a matter of protests outside every pharmacy: if we were to lose a very small number of key facilities, our capacity to respond to medical emergencies and deliver up-to-date medicines to people through the NHS would be much diminished.

I understand the noble Baroness’s challenge, but I am in no doubt that the facilities that enable us to comply with those key regulations applying to pharmaceuticals are absolutely part of key national infrastructure. Surely, the lesson of Covid is how important that capacity is. Of course it is right for us in this House to consider whether the proposal is within the terms of the provisions for national infrastructure. But, having observed at close hand what we depend on for drugs and services that we take for granted, I am in no doubt that it is.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I just want to throw in a bit of a spanner—which is to say that I am completely torn between the two sides. It might be helpful to explain my dilemma. First, I would like to give real credit to the noble Lord, Lord Winston, for the work that he has done scientifically and the need to use animals in experiments, which he explained. I was partly moved to speak because I was a great admirer of, and friend of, neuroscientist Professor Colin Blakemore, who died a few years ago. I just wanted to note that he had to heroically stand his ground against intimidation, harassment, threats of violence and actual terror, which was deployed—not just against him—by animal rights activists.

He and other less well-known scientists, medical researchers, and staff in academia and in private companies were confronted by abuse and accused of conducting a holocaust—a completely inappropriate use of the term—on animals that was worse than the Nazis. I witnessed some of that.

This was long before organisations such as Just Stop Oil and Palestine Action arrived on the scene, which blur the line between the democratic right to protest and the anti-democratic bullying of the public and institutions to do as the activists demand. That presents us with a genuine dilemma. I support the right to protest, but I sometimes worry that that right is used to justify people who are not interested in protesting but are interested in effecting the stoppage of a particular activity physically and through bullying people.

Having said all of that, I want to ask the Minister why this sector has come into scope only now and not before. I genuinely do not understand. Why has it been introduced as a statutory instrument, with no possibility of opposition, apart from via a fatal amendment? I was one of those people who was very worried about the Public Order Act and the powers handed over to the Secretary of State, precisely because I was worried that the Secretary of State could redefine what national infrastructure projects were—and here we have it. That has been very well explained.

I also feel rather squeamish about our emphasis on life sciences as an industry and national infrastructure without it being defended as scientific research for its own sake. I wish I had heard so much defence of the importance of animal research by politicians on all sides when those scientists were being attacked. I think of animal research in terms of epilepsy drugs, Parkinson’s disease, anti-cancer drugs and therapies such as Herceptin and tamoxifen. I find it disappointing that we stand up to defend it only when it is an industry that makes money. There is more to scientific research and animal research than that, surely.

However, I was also disappointed by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and, particularly, by the briefings —goodness knows I received many of those emails. On the one hand, I agree with the right to protest and the concerns about constitutional overreach; I actually thought the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, made some really excellent points—it is not often we agree—as to why this is slightly nerve-wracking. On the other hand, in all the emails I received—in fact, this was reproduced here by the noble Baroness—I have been lectured on the dangers of animal research, and I end up feeling that what I am being asked to vote on is whether I think animal research is important for medical science. I understand the three Rs, including replacement, and that it is not where we are going, but it is so important to emphasise that this animal research is going to carry on for some time—we cannot be dishonest about that. Therefore, if I am being asked to vote on this fatal amendment—and if it has been turned into a way of demonising researchers who work with animals—then I will either not vote for it or abstain.

I ask the Minister: why now? Why did he, or anybody else, not raise this before? I say to the noble Baroness: can I risk siding with people who are going to lecture us and make hectoring demonisations of the perfectly legitimate—and, in my view, heroic—scientists who do animal research? It is necessary for humanity, whatever its relationships with the economy.