Fertility treatment 'should be available to more on NHS'

The leading fertility doctor Robert Winston called yesterday for in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment to be made more widely available on the NHS.

Only 20 per cent of IVF "cycles" are provided free by the state. People who opt for private treatment pay, on average, £2,800 for each attempt.

The Government's National Institute for Clinical Excellence is investigating the costs and benefits of providing more IVF on the NHS.

Speaking at a conference at the Royal College of Obstetricians in north London, Lord Winston said: "There's no other branch of medicine where people who are not well or suffer disease pay some sort of tax at the source of treatment."

Lord Winston, professor of fertility studies at Imperial College, London, also said the organisation in charge of embryo research, the Human Fertility and Embryology Authority (HFEA), had become "distracted" from its main role.

"It is a worry that it gets itself into things like the dispute over Diane Blood [who was inseminated using her dead husband's sperm] or, more recently, by public consultation on whether we should have sex selection clinics," he said. "Sex selection is irrelevant to infertility treatment."

He also attacked the fertility regulator's database system, which had corrupted national data on the clinics' performance. Richard Kennedy, a consultant at the Coventry NHS trust, criticised hikes in the fees that the HFEA charges to clinics, which will rise from £40 per IVF cycle to £100 from next year. "For a typical fertility clinic, that's a rise in annual cost from £10,000 to £50,000 – that's the cost of two nurses or an embryologist," he said.

But an spokeswoman for the embryology authority rejected the criticisms. "The HFEA is a regulatory authority on fertility, but under the 1990 HFE Act we also have a role providing advice on policy, for which we receive funding from the Government," she said. "Our policy advice on sex selection was done at the request of the Department of Health."

The rise in fees was necessary, she said. "There's a perceived need to overhaul how the HFEA investigates and licenses clinics."