Animal Testing

Danny Chambers Excerpts

Monday 27th April 2026 Westminster Hall

[Dr Danny Chambers (Winchester) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mr Stuart. I thank the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Irene Campbell) for securing the debate and for her tireless championing of animal welfare in Parliament. This is not the first debate to be secured on animal welfare issues, and it really is making a difference. We rarely have the Gallery full, but the fact that it is today shows how many people support animal welfare and care about Herbie’s law and ending animal testing.

Like other Members, I have been contacted by many constituents about this subject. I will not repeat everyone’s arguments, because they were all expressed very eloquently and put very well, but I will reiterate that an animal’s intelligence has no relation to its capacity to suffer. A sentient animal will experience pain, emotions, suffering and mental distress in the same way that we do. All the research that has been done has shown that animals have the same range and even depth of emotions as humans. They may get excited or scared about different things, but their lived experience is as real to them as ours is to us.

Many people mentioned their pets. We have a labrador called Moose. When he hears the fridge door open, he comes flying into the kitchen in excitement, and if he is caught on the sofa when he is not meant to be there, he clearly feels guilt. As a vet, having seen a variety of animal species—horses, cattle, dogs, cats, chickens—in states of distress, injury or sickness, I know that the emotion and suffering they feel is as strong as any person’s.

I served for years on the British Veterinary Association’s policy committee, and it very much supported the reduce, refine and replace model. That was several years ago, but we are now in a very exciting time, because it feels as though we finally have the technology that means that we really could move away from animal testing in a meaningful way and very quickly. Members have talked about computer modelling, organs on a chip and AI—the way it can model protein folding, and test various treatments and pharmaceuticals without having to use animals, potentially with even more valuable results. It is a really exciting time.

We as a country, and the Government, must ensure that we are supporting our life sciences industry to do that. Life sciences are coming forward with some of the most exciting breakthroughs in medicine to help solve a whole load of diseases that we never thought could be treated, including cancers and rare diseases. They are also vital to growing the economy. As we do all we can to support the life sciences industry, both in developing new technologies and in moving away from testing on animals, can the Minister say whether any work is being done to make sure that we do not inadvertently offshore animal testing? As upsetting as it is to have animal testing in the UK, standards are higher here than anywhere else in the world. What I would hate to see happen—I am sure that everyone is united on this—is for us to ban animal testing and move away from it here, and for it simply to be offshored to somewhere with less regulation and even more suffering to be caused as a consequence.

I also want to bring up the licensing of drugs that have already been tested. Currently, drugs are tested on animals; if they pass animal testing, they go on to humans; and if they pass human testing, they get a licence. The drugs have been proven to work in animals, yet they do not have a licence for the animals and cannot be used in them. It seems to me that if something has passed safety tests and been proven to work in animals, there should be automatic licensing, or what we call dual licensing, to ensure that the animals on which there has been testing have the benefit of the drug. Currently, that is not the case.

We also have situations in which drugs pass animal tests but fail human tests and then cannot be used on the animals, even though they passed those tests. Although we want to move away from animal testing, it seems wrong that animals cannot mutually benefit, from a legal perspective, from the testing that has already been done. I hosted an event last week for the Humanimal Trust, which is calling for dual licensing. Its academics are from the vet school at the University of Surrey. I would be very keen for the Minister, if he is interested, to meet that team, because they have done a lot of work on this issue as well.

We are looking at updating the Veterinary Surgeons Act 1966. There is currently a cascade for the prescription of drugs for animals, and sometimes pharmaceutical companies can get a retrospective licence. For example, there might be a human drug that is used in animals and is working really well. The drug company will then do the research and get a licence for that specific drug, and then no one else can use it and it becomes very expensive. We would like to look at how the Act, and the cascade for prescribing for animals, can mean that drugs that have been proven to work in humans and animals are more easily prescribed.

This is a really good example that many people will have encountered: they go to the vet, who prescribes paracetamol that costs a lot of money, but then they discover that paracetamol is 16p in a shop. As vets, we are not allowed to prescribe that paracetamol for a dog. We are not trying to fleece people; it is not legal, and a vet prescribing it would be struck off. That is how the law works at the moment. I am really keen that, along with the desperately needed update to the Veterinary Surgeons Act, we look at prescribing rules and licensing as a big, holistic piece of work.

I am very proud that the Liberal Democrats, in coalition, managed to bring forward the work to stop the testing of household products on animals. I am very proud to be an honorary senior lecturer at Bristol University vet school in the area of One Health. For anyone who does not know, that is the recognition that human health, animal health and environmental health are all completely interlinked. There are many diseases and things like antimicrobial resistance that affect humans and animals. We know that 75% of new and emerging infectious diseases that could potentially cause a pandemic are of animal origin. They are often related to farming practices as well. It is impossible to improve human health, environmental health or animal health without seeing the three as completely linked and addressing them all. Moving away from animal testing but having more accurate testing, and the right licensing and regulation, to ensure that animals and humans can mutually benefit from scientific advances is not only an opportunity but the morally right thing to do.