Home Department written question – answered at on 9 July 2007.
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what steps her Department has taken in response to the recommendations of the (a) 2002 House of Lords Select Committee Report on Animals in Scientific Procedures, (b) Animals Procedures Committee (APC) 2001 Report on Openness, (c) the APC's 2003 review of Cost-benefit Assessment in the Use of Animals in Research and (d) the APC's 2005 Report on the Statistics of Scientific Procedures on Living Animals in Scientific Procedures; and if she will make a statement.
Our response to the report of the House of Lord Select Committee on animals in scientific procedures was published in January 2003 (CM 5729) and our responses to the Animal Procedures Committee (APC) reports on openness and the cost benefit assessment have been published in the APC annual reports for 2001 and 2005, respectively. These documents are available in the House Library. We responded to the APC statistics report in January 2006 and a copy of that response is available on the Committee's website.
The main steps we have taken in the light of these reports have been as follows. We have:
established a national centre for the replacement, refinement and reduction of animals in research (the NCSRs); reviewed section 24 of the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986, the so-called "confidentiality clause", and concluded that it should be should be retained and reviewed again when we have seen the full effect of the safeguards provided by the Freedom of Information Act 2000; since January 2005, published the details of over 800 project licences granted under the 1986 Act on the Home Office website; begun publishing an Animals (Scientific Procedures) Inspectorate annual report and placed copies of the first two reports, for 2004 and 2005, in the House Library; made presentational changes to the Statistics of Scientific Procedures on Living Animals Great Britain 2005 to make them more reader-friendly; identified further presentational changes to be made to the Statistics of Scientific Procedures on Living Animals Great Britain 2006 to be published shortly; and through our on going contacts, worked with the NCSRs and others to identify areas of animal use in which specific gains in the reduction, replacement and refinement of animal procedures might be achievable in the future.
Other changes to the annual statistics publication will be considered later taking account of the recommendations of the Davidson Review of the transposition of European legislation in the United Kingdom and relevant issues raised by the proposed revision of European Directive 86/609/EEC, which the 1986 Act transposes into United Kingdom legislation. Some further information relevant to the cost benefit assessment will also be published when a current judicial review, the outcome of which may be relevant, has been completed.
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