ASRU (Animals in Science Regulatory Unit), the Home Office department that ‘protects’ laboratory animals, fails yet again.
On 10th March 2023 a Freedom of Information request was sent asking why the number of project licences approved in the ASRU annual reports did not match the number of published Non-technical Summary (NTS) documents.
The biggest discrepancy was in 2019 where there were 411 more NTS published than project licences granted.
After months of back and forth and numerous complaints yesterday ASRU re-published the NTS lists and its annual reports for 2019 – 2021.
They claim it was an administrative error, but in the meanwhile millions of animals continue to suffer and die inside UK laboratories.
We cannot stress enough the importance of these failures, as well as those relating to the statistics compliance check we instigated. It only goes to prove that the Home Office and ASRU are NOT FIT FOR PURPOSE.
Information on animal testing is heavily redacted and restricted from public access, but now it transpires that the limited information the Home Office makes public is actually inaccurate and false.
We have a further expose coming up very shortly as it appears more than half of retrospective assessments are missing, these are required by law and the current explanation is ‘we are aware of gaps in our database’ these gaps go back to 2018 and 9 months ago we were told they were being urgently investigated.
You can read the Home Office reply to our FOI request, and ASRU official Explanatory Note to their data failures, here:
To download the Home Office ‘Correction’ in PDF Format Click Here
Thank you for keeping on the case and not letting these government offices get away with fiddling the statistics.❤️