Question
To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the Written Answer by Earl Howe on 30 November (WA 69), if it cannot now be stated definitively that all gamete providers were promptly notified that resulting embryos were used in research without their consent, what action they would expect to be taken by a centre licensed by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) to rectify this; and how such expectations relate to the HFEA Compliance and Enforcement Policy (2011) which states, ““the onus is on centres to demonstrate compliance, not on inspectors to find fault””.
Answer
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority advises that, in the absence of data which would identify a gamete provider whose gametes had been used in a past research project, it would be unreasonable to expect a centre to review its full set of clinical records on all donors in a particular year.