After 19 years of controversial existence there is a real possibility that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) will be axed. It has rarely been remembered during two decades of relentless embryo destruction that the original HFE Act 1990 came into being with the primary objective of protecting the special status of early human life. Licences for treatment or research involving the human embryo could only be authorised if shown unequivocally to be necessary or desirable.

With the Authority in the hands of an unelected, unrepresentative committee overtly on the side of the fertility and libertarian scientific communities, it is hardly surprising that respect for the human embryo has rarely been upheld. Almost every licence application landing on the HFEA's desk gets approval. Human embryos can now be used as practice tools by embryologists simply to improve biopsy techniques. (1)

So three cheers for the forthcoming 'bonfire of the quangos', a phrase used in 1995 by Gordon Brown, then Shadow Chancellor, in an attack on 'over-centralised, over-secretive and over-bureaucratic' government. (2) The present government's bonfire is principally aimed at increased efficiency and economy, but it is nevertheless a joy to find the HFEA high on its list of 177 doomed quangos, or 'Arm's Length Bodies' as they prefer to call them. If all goes well the HFEA's functions are to be parcelled out by the end of the current Parliament to the Care Quality Commission, the Health and Social Care Information Centre, and a new research regulator. (3)

Whether or not the HFEA will actually end up on the pyre is still cause for heated discussion. Some argue this is unlikely as it would require an Act of Parliament to rescind existing provisions in the Act which govern the HFEA. It is hard to imagine the current government not anticipating this problem. Experts suggest that a specific piece of overarching preliminary legislation could govern the disbanding of all targeted quangos, and the necessary changes could then be effected without need for primary legislation.

At the last public meeting of the HFEA (8 October 2010), Chairman Lisa Jardine was taking possible closure very seriously. While bravely stating that in the interim they would 'carry on carrying on', it was anticipated that significant changes would be effected before the end of 2013. The demise of the HFEA is a possibility and there should be no tears. The ethical responsibility for unbiased defence of the human embryo must be entrusted to a competent representative body independent of the fertility industry, with final decisions determined democratically in Parliament.