Animal Testing

David Chadwick Excerpts

Monday 27th April 2026 Westminster Hall

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Twigg. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Irene Campbell) for opening the debate. She is a real asset to the Petitions Committee. She has led a number of debates on animal welfare issues with great expertise. She is a real champion of animal welfare and is doing great work on the all-party parliamentary group.

An important thing about the APPG is the extent to which it is evidence based. We can all stand here and get emotional about the horrors of animal testing and some of the things we have seen—such as the undercover footage of the dogs and macaques that the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty) mentioned—but when we make the case it is important to be able to present the alternative as well. My hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran has been doing that with great expertise.

I thank the hon. Member for Huntingdon for his support for Camp Beagle and the campaign against MBR Acres. He is quite right that some of us voted against the effort to quell protests against the site; it seemed a case of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. It also seems unfortunate that although, to a small extent, we had a debate in Committee, we did not have a debate on the measure on the Floor of the House. I know the Minister is not the Home Office Minister who was responsible for that delegated legislation, but there are still so many questions about what sort of protest will now be possible and to what extent the laws will be used. I hope the Minister has been briefed so that he can answer some of those questions.

Having said that, it is good to see a DSIT Minister here. I have been around almost as long as the lord my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran mentioned; it seems like I have been here talking about animal welfare issues for 100 years, but it is only 21. In the past, the split between the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which has the pure animal welfare brief, and the Home Office, which often responds to debates because it is responsible for licensing, has been difficult.

I remember, just before the general election, a debate in which George Eustice took part. He had been an EFRA Secretary of State and, before that, a Minister with responsibility for animal welfare, and he was one of those who joined me in calling for one Department to hold the issue of animal testing, so that we knew we would always get answers. Particularly in respect of the Home Office, animal testing is quite peripheral to the relevant Minister’s wider brief—I think she covers policing and all sorts of other issues—so it is difficult to get focus. I therefore welcome the fact that the Science Minister, even if he is in the other place and not here today, has responsibility and has brought forward the road map. I hope he is working closely on this with colleagues in DEFRA and the Home Office.

We could spend a lot of time talking about the horrors of animal testing and why we want to see it replaced, but I will also look forward and talk about the positive signals about replacing it that are now being sent. I want, though, to dwell for a moment on the forced swim test, which my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran talked about. As she said, it is particularly cruel and its use cannot be justified. She quoted the Government’s strategy on replacing animals in science, in which they admitted:

“The test has limited scientific validity, particularly its translational relevance to human mental health disorders.”

That was more or less what I was told when I met scientific researchers at the University of Bristol a few years ago. God knows how many times and on how many animals they had carried out that test—it must have been easily in the thousands, if not many more. They said to me, “We have not spotted anything interesting yet, but we’ll probably carry on doing it in case something interesting happens”. That seemed to me a complete exercise in futility, and a casual and callous approach to the purpose of tests.

If tests are being carried out, we want to know that they at least have a point and are essential. I accept that we are not in a position to replace all animal testing tomorrow, but we absolutely ought to be keeping it to a minimum. Scientists doing tests on mice just in case they spot something fascinating seems completely wrong. As far as I know, researchers have now paused such tests, but they have not committed to dropping them altogether and, as we heard, there are still three granted licenses that run until 2028. Although I would like to be able to trust scientists to down tools if they feel that the tests no longer have a purpose, will the Minister tell us whether the Government have considered revoking those licences? What is the purpose of allowing the licences to continue? Are they ever revoked, or do we always rely on scientists to make the call?

[David Chadwick (Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe) (LD)]

The hon. Member is making a sincere and excellent speech, and just made a brilliant point. As we heard earlier, in 2023 some 2.6 million animals were still being tested on, which is a moral atrocity. Does the hon. Member agree that the move away from animal testing should lead to greater investment in testing that will drive better scientific outcomes?

[Kerry McCarthy]

It is important to make the case that this is not just about people being horrified by the cruelty involved. It is also about the fact that the tests have been proven in so many cases not to be effective, not to yield useful results and not to be the best way to make progress in medical discoveries. My hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran mentioned a couple of those points.

On the point about conflicts with commercial consideration, the reason why MBR Acres put pressure on the Government and wanted to quell protests is that it is under some pressure: my understanding is that it is struggling to find customers and homes for its beagles because of the protests and the fact that people have quite rightly been horrified that tests are continuing. Where does that commercial pressure sit against the Government’s stated desire to adopt the three Rs, and the measures to reduce the use of animals in experiments set out in the animal welfare strategy and road map? How do we make sure that the Government’s stated intentions prevail over the commercial considerations?

On a more positive note, it is encouraging to see the progress that is being made on NAMs, and the Government throwing their weight behind that with £75 million for the new UK centre for the validation of alternative methods. I was particularly interested to hear what my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran said about the potential for using AI to help to replace animal testing. She mentioned the AnimalGAN software being developed by the FDA in the US, which could be used to determine how rats would react to chemicals without having to do new tests, and the Virtual Second Species challenge to create an AI-powered virtual dog, trained on historic dog tests, which sounds fantastic.

In the strategy on replacing animals in science, the Government committed to setting up a new animal research institute that will

“bring together data, AI, cell engineering, genomic technology and cutting-edge disease modelling capabilities to generate collaborative research at scale”.

As I said, the University of Bristol was involved historically in the forced swim test. It is also at the forefront of AI innovation and research and was, as a result, chosen to host the Isambard-AI supercomputer, one of the fastest computers in the world. A very excited Secretary of State launched it in July last year; if the Minister has not yet had a chance to visit and learn about Isambard, there is an open invitation for him to do so.

We have been told that the supercomputer will spearhead scientific breakthroughs in, among other things, the discovery of new drugs. It could be used to analyse cell data, for advanced medical image modelling, for large-scale biostatistics on human data sets, for medical genetic modelling and for organ-on-a-chip simulations, which my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran mentioned. In saying all that, my complete ignorance of these issues probably shines through, but it all sounds like it has huge potential, and there is already a huge amount of interest from researchers who want to use Isambard. I will follow up with the University of Bristol to ask whether anyone has approached it who wants to use it to research NAMs, and if so what priority the university will give to such usage.

There is great potential to use the super-brain in the computer. One reason why there are so many tests is that there is huge duplication and replication of tests, involving a huge number of animals. If we could use AI to number-crunch some of that, we could reduce the numbers in leaps and bounds, so I hope the university will get involved in the new institute. I hope the Minister can say a little more about whether he thinks AI is the way forward to help to bring down the number of animal tests significantly.