Animal Experiments

(asked on 11th November 2016) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment her Department has made of the accuracy and independence of retrospective reporting by researchers performing scientific procedures on animals, as a method for assessing the severity of suffering experienced by animals subjected to such procedures; and if she will make a statement.


Answered by
Ben Wallace Portrait
Ben Wallace
This question was answered on 29th November 2016

Project licence holders or suitably qualified individuals acting on their behalf are expected to classify actual severity at the end of the series of procedures based on day-today observations of the animals, and submit the data to the regulator as part of the annual returns process. The regulator has published guidance on the assessment and reporting of the actual severity experienced by animals that have undergone regulated procedures. The first requirement to report actual severity to the regulator was from 1 January 2015 for procedures ending in 2014 and are published at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-of-scientific-procedures-on-living-animals

The Home Department has not conducted a systematic review of the available data from 2014 and 2015.

Reticulating Splines