FOI release

FOI2025/00103 - Recorded Information on Veterinary Medicines Approvals, Complaints, and Competition Impacts

Published 5 February 2026

1. FOI2025/00103 Request

Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, I request the following recorded information related to the UK veterinary pharmaceuticals market, focused exclusively on authorization and enforcement under the Veterinary Medicines Regulations 2013 in relation to safety, quality, and efficacy. As Director of COCOO.uk, this information will support analysis of potential regulatory failures that may have caused harm to animals or consumers, enabling claims for compensation.

1. Copies of all complaints or enquiries received since January 1, 2020, regarding safety concerns (e.g., adverse reactions), quality defects (e.g., manufacturing issues), or efficacy failures (e.g., ineffective treatments) in veterinary medicines.

2. Internal documents, emails, or reports on VMD’s actions (or reasons for inaction) in addressing such safety, quality, or efficacy issues, including enforcement of VMR.

3. Correspondence with pharmaceutical companies (e.g., Pfizer, Bayer) on product authorizations specifically concerning safety assessments, quality controls, or efficacy evaluations since 2020.

4. Any internal reports or data on disparities in safety profiles, quality standards, or efficacy outcomes between veterinary and human medicines.

5. Details of any reviews or audits of VMR provisions related to barriers affecting safety, quality, or efficacy, including collaboration with Defra.

2. Our reply

After careful consideration, we have concluded that your request is vexatious because:

• the breadth of the request is extremely wide, covering a large volume of information across multiple areas
• complying with the request would impose a grossly oppressive burden on the VMD in terms of time and resources, significantly disrupting our ability to carry out core functions
• the effort required to locate, retrieve, and extract the information would be disproportionate to any apparent public interest or value in the material requested

This decision is based on ICO guidance, which recognises that requests which are excessively broad or burdensome can be considered vexatious under Section 14(1).

Please note that this decision is not a reflection on you as the requester, but solely on the nature and scope of the request itself.

However, in addition to the information we provided to you in response to ATI1123, you may find this publicly available information useful:

Where a suspected defective product is considered to pose a serious risk to animal or public health we will normally instruct the MAH to withdraw the affected product from the market, that is, to initiate a product recall. The recall level will depend on the seriousness of the risk. All product recalls are published on GOV.UK and a 12-month rolling list is published on Report a product defect: veterinary medicine.

We publish Urgent and clinically significant safety updates for veterinary medicines in the last 12 months and other pharmacovigilance updates.

On our stakeholder site, www.vmdconnect.uk, we publish a summary of new marketing authorisations and changes to existing authorisations that relate to the safe use of the product in our monthly medicines updates.

Our Product Information Database includes details of Suspended products and Refused applications.

We publish our responses to Freedom of Information/Environmental Information Regulation requests on Transparency and freedom of information releases.