Let me congratulate Bill Etherington on securing the debate. He is right that the House should constantly debate this issue. I had little difficulty with much of his speech, although I respectfully disagree with him on several issues, which I shall raise. I congratulate Sir John Butterfill on putting the case for the Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Experiments so clearly. FRAME has brought respectability to this area of opposition, rather than simply adopting a black-and-white approach to animal testing, and I do not criticise its work.

Even if I wanted to, I could find no Member of the House and no scientist who uses animals for experiments who would not like to find an alternative way of doing those experiments. I do not believe that there is a demand, other than from people who are particularly perverse, for inflicting pain on animals. I acknowledge people's genuine concerns about this issue, but I have real difficulty with the title and central thrust of today's debate, which is really about the production of statistics and the idea that producing more statistics will somehow improve the lot of animals and reduce the number being used in experiments. Neither FRAME nor anyone else has produced evidence that having better statistics will drive down the number of animals being used.