The Commons Committee Called It Evidence Check 2

The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee published its conclusions on homeopathy in February 2010 — and the government's formal response arrived five months later.

The Inquiry

The inquiry ran under the committee's "Evidence Check" framework, a procedure designed to assess whether government policy rested on sound scientific evidence. Homeopathy was the second subject examined under that framework, which is why the final report carries the formal title Evidence Check 2: Homeopathy. The committee took oral evidence in November 2009 across two sessions, hearing from witnesses including representatives of the Society of Homeopaths, the British Homeopathic Association, and the Faculty of Homeopathy, alongside academic scientists and officials from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency and the Department of Health.

The conclusions section, where a review states its own finding rather than a summary of it.Photo: MART PRODUCTION / Pexels

The questioning turned substantially on two bodies of published evidence. The committee considered the 1997 meta-analysis by Klaus Linde et al. in The Lancet, which had found results not entirely consistent with placebo, and the 2005 meta-analysis by Aijing Shang et al., also in The Lancet, which concluded that the clinical effects of homeopathy were consistent with placebo effects. Members also examined the underlying arithmetic of serial dilution — specifically, at what dilution step no molecules of the original solute remain statistically likely, as established by Avogadro's number, the constant 6.022 × 10²³.

The Committee's Conclusions

The committee's report, published 22 February 2010, set out several formal conclusions. It concluded that the evidence base for homeopathy was not convincing and that the principles of homeopathy — chiefly that a substance is effective below the concentration at which any molecule of it can plausibly remain — were scientifically implausible. The report specifically recommended that the NHS should cease funding homeopathy, that the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency should not grant product licences that implied efficacy for homeopathic preparations on the basis of traditional use alone, and that homeopathic pills should not be labelled with indications unless they carried evidence meeting the standards applied to any other medicine.

The committee also addressed the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital — by then operating under the name Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine — and its position within NHS provision. The report did not recommend closure of the hospital, but it recommended that NHS funding for homeopathic treatment within it and at other NHS-funded homeopathic facilities should end.

On the question of placebos, the committee made a careful distinction: it acknowledged that placebo effects can be clinically meaningful, but stated that prescribing a placebo while describing it as a medicine constitutes deliberate deception and is, on those grounds, unacceptable. The full text of the report ↗ is held in the Parliamentary publications archive.

The Government's Response

The government's formal response was published in July 2010. It accepted some of the committee's analysis but rejected several of its central recommendations. The Department of Health declined to issue blanket guidance to primary care trusts to cease funding homeopathy, arguing that commissioning decisions should remain at local level. It also declined to direct the MHRA to withdraw traditional herbal and homeopathic product registrations that carried no clinical evidence requirement, stating that existing regulatory arrangements were adequate. On labelling, the government response did not commit to requiring evidence-based indications on homeopathic products.

The government's position was criticised by several of the scientists who had given oral evidence, and the committee itself noted its disappointment at the response in subsequent correspondence. The divergence between what the committee concluded and what the government accepted illustrates a recurring pattern in parliamentary scrutiny: a select committee's report carries moral and rhetorical authority, but no binding power over departmental policy.