 I'm Fran Borkwell. I'm chair of understanding animal research and I like to start by thanking our sponsors which is the British Pharmacological Society in the British Association for Psychopharmacology. Thank you for sponsoring this evening. Before we start on the formal business of the evening, I'd like to just say a few words because this is actually the last time I'm going to be chairing this evening because I will be stepping down having chaired UAR for the past six years. It seems like about two, but the past six years, it's about time to let somebody else take the reins of chairing council. First of all, I'd just like to thank the UAR staff, especially Wendy and all the team for the most fantastic job they've done over the past six years. It's just been so many good things have happened. The concordat obviously is the biggest thing, but there's many other very positive and proactive things that have been initiated in the past six years, and it's all down to them. Also, a really great council, a really great support, and a really good focus group that we have on council. It's been a great pleasure and honour to chair UAR in these exciting years. As an academic, I'm really thrilled that we brought back the Padgett Lecture as well because I think that was a very special thing, and so that's also very good to see you here tonight. I'd also like to announce that UAR council, led by the Governance Group, has appointed a new chair to take over from me at the AGM, and there was a strong list of six candidates I'm told. There was nothing to do with me, but there was one person who really fitted the bill so well, and we're absolutely delighted that he's agreed to do it, and that is Jeremy Pearson, who's sitting at the back because he's got a sore throat. Jeremy, thank you so much, and I know you'll be a fantastic chair, and we'll hear more about that at the next AGM. Having said that, I would just like to say it's been a really great year for UAR. Again, thanks to the team for hard work over the past 12 months. Their work behind the scenes meant that none of the main political parties included any mention of animal research in their election manifestos. Social media work has been very strong again this year. There's a new platform in Instagram and ever-increasing numbers of followers on Facebook and Twitter. Schools education programme continues to be a major part of UAR's work, and we've come here to celebrate some outstanding examples of openness. It's also important to remember that there's a small army out there of researchers and technicians who do superb work that we can't always reward as we would like to, but our schools volunteers, as many of you know, give up their time to go into classrooms all over the country to speak about animal research. That takes some courage as well as dedication, and it makes a huge impact. We know this on the young people they meet, so here are names of some of the volunteers. Those who have been doing the most heavy lifting over the last school term. I would like to thank them on behalf of UAR for their time and efforts, and I hope they will keep up their excellent work for a long time to come. Before we ask Colin Bacemawr to give the 79th, not the 97th, the 79th Stephen Padgett Memorial Lecture, we're going to spend a little while focusing on UAR's main project over the past few years, the Concordat on Openness in Animal Research in the UK. We are now at 97 signatures according to the programme. In fact, it's 98 because another one's been added since then, and so I think we're confident we'll reach 100 in early 2016. You will know that we publish the first annual report on the progress that the signatures have made in implementing the commitments. You will each have a copy of the report in your bags this evening, and thanks to the MRC who kindly printed them for us. The steering group of the Concordat were really impressed by the results of the signatures achieved in the first year, and the quality and number of entries we have for the Openness awards, and this really reflects just how far the sector has come since the Concordat was published. So last year we celebrated the individuals and organisations that paved the way for the Openness agenda and made the Concordat on Openness a possibility. This year we followed a more traditional format for an awards programme by inviting entries in four categories. So we're very grateful to our judging panel, and I think you're going to see their names up there next, who gave up their time to consider all the entries and decide on the winners in the four categories, as well as four highly commended entries. The judging panel would like to thank everyone who entered the awards, and we particularly like to thank individual researchers who sent in entries. We do hope that you'll continue to develop excellent new practices and enter these awards again in the future, because this is not the last ceremony. We've commended entries and winners in each category, and all of them will receive an animal print, and they're drawn by a member of UAR staff called Mia Rosenbaum, and the winners will also have one of these rather nice and not too heavy glass Openness awards. So now it's my job to hand over to the people who are going to present the awards, and first I'm going to hand over to Mark Prescott from the National Centre for the Three Rs, who's very kindly at the last minute come in to replace Vicki Robinson, who apologises but she's got the flu, so I can hand over to Mark. Well thank you very much and delighted to be here to present this award. Vicki's tucked up in bed, but she sends her best wishes. You'll have to make do with the less glamorous and less frightening, frankly Mark Prescott. So I'm presenting the awards in the category internal or sector engagement activity, and there are two awards that are highly commended and a winner. The highly commended award goes to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology for a series of posters on the named persons under the act. The judges were really impressed with these posters which set out the roles and responsibilities of the people working within the animal facility to the whole unit, and it was particularly impressive in their opinion to see a poster on the establishment licence holder linking senior management with the animal care staff. The judges did comment that it would be nice to see a mechanism for raising concerns on these posters and hoped that they could be displayed in public areas as well as the animal facility, but they were really impressed with the idea and they'd like to see other establishments develop something similar, so please can the representatives of the MRC LMB come forward. So the winning award in this category goes to Agenda. The judges were very impressed with Agenda's support network for animal technicians who are the principal workers in this sector, and Agenda has contributed greatly to providing care for people who can quite easily find themselves isolated and unsupported in their work, so providing a mechanism to raise concerns in several ways is what Agenda has done, and they were really impressed with the got a concern process, so please could the representatives of Agenda come forward. Hello everyone. If I could first make sure that's what you're just say how pleasant it is to be invited here. Thank you very much, and it's so nice to see so many familiar faces. I want to just briefly say a word about how important I think this openness agenda is because as many of you will know I did work on it for some years, and we started from very small beginnings with very few people being prepared to be open or to speak out and very few institutions. I've just started a new post quite recently at the British Heart Foundation, and at the end of the recruitment interview the interviewer turned and said I've got to ask you a few standard questions, the first of which is are you comfortable with the fact that some of our research, some of the research we fund involves the use of animals. He looked up at me and he said I hardly need you to answer that because it was your work that was responsible for having that question in there, and since then I've actually done quite a lot of recruitment myself at the British Heart Foundation and we asked that question and nobody raises an eyelid. They say we've looked at your statement, it all makes perfect sense, and it's worth remembering that that's an organisation with 3,000 staff, they're all asked that question, as long as these amazing initiatives there's a drip, drip, drip going on there right across the country of good work on openness. So I'm delighted to be presenting the winners of the public engagement activity section and the highly commended award goes to the Baberham Institute. So this is for a new and innovative approach to enabling the public to see inside a facility which designed with the public in mind namely cameras and again I would just interject on the notes and say that this is such a step forward and I remember those early discussions a decade ago, could we ever get cameras in labs and everybody just thought no way that is never going to happen. The committee found this commitment to outreach and engagement very exciting and look forward to hearing about the resulting public engagement at the Baberham Institute. So could I invite the representative from the Baberham to come and receive the award please. And the winner of this category is University of Leicester. Again this has significance to me as I remember going to those very first meetings when the university had just been named as a target for a protest by the animal rights groups and was struck right from the beginning at the very deliberative and thoughtful manner in which they were thinking they would respond to this. I know they've won a number of awards along the way and I think that's very highly deserved for what was really very impressive work. So this piece of work and organisation was originally nominated in the category of internal engagement but the committee felt it was more appropriate to make the award in the public engagement category. The university have led an enormous culture change and have been truly open and were the first academic institution to in fact first institution to sign the Concordat. They consistently advocated the benefits of openness and have led the way and have not any one other awards but gone and spoke in other fora about the work they've done. They've been enormously helpful across the sector now offering support and advice from their own example to institutions that follow suit and the impact of what they've achieved has been enormous. So we're very pleased to make this award to University of Leicester in recognition of their great contribution to openness in the UK life sciences. And could we have the representative? Is Arthur isn't it? Yes. I'm handing over to Sir Colin Blaymore. Thank you. I have the task and the pleasure of the award for media engagement or media stories. The role of the media in the issue of public relations on the use of animals is of course absolutely crucial and personally I think that one of the really key steps in the process that we many of you in this room experienced maybe 15 years ago of the dramatic change in public opinion, the attitude of the government and the increased willingness of researchers to participate in this agenda of communication. I think a key step was the change in the style and behaviour of the media. It wasn't necessarily primary. I think it depended a lot on the recognition of the media that researchers involved in animal research and institutions involved in animal research were becoming more willing to talk about the issue. I mean you could hardly be blamed for running stories based almost entirely on whatever copy they obtained from the critics of animal research if there was no response from the other side. But the change in styles of media is almost impossible to remember what media coverage was like 10 or 15 years ago and it simply doesn't happen now. So it's been a very, very important development. So the highly commended award goes to BBC Panorama. Can you cure my cancer? The research involved was fitted into a patient story of course as is so often the case in media coverage but in a way that made the research both engaging and highly relevant to the clinical issues. The honesty behind this piece of broadcasting, the willingness of the staff at the institute to work with the media and to be filmed was impressive particularly as they had no previous experience of engaging in this way. We hope that it will pave the way for more stories in this format. Pleas to present this award to the Institute for Cancer Research for an excellent piece of research. I'm not sure who's receiving the award. Yes indeed, you're holding. Would you like one as well? Thanks very much. Thank you. And the winner in this category is in the context of the visit by the Mirror to Marmazet Facilities at King's College London. This piece of work was sparked by a press release from Animal Aid calling for charities to stop funding animal research. In that context it was a very brave piece of work as shown by some of our language used in the article. The Mirror usually hostile to animal research or had certainly been in the past but tabloid readers are a vital audience if we're to reach people without extensive knowledge on the subject of animal use so this was a really important step. The work in the article is strictly translational and the harms to the animals as well as the potential benefits were made very clear. The award winner then is King's College London. Now we have photographs of the non-shire member of King's College. Are you not going to come and join us for the other two awards? There are two more to give away and that is all. Thank you. Thanks very much. I'm sorry now I had over two. I'll leave my computer there. Well I have to say it's bad luck for the runners up for this one because Colin gave the price of the last one. It's just been restored. So I always have a sort of slightly surreal sense of deja vu when I come back into this building but you know your history here when they search you before you can get in. So I was very pleased to be able to write the foreword to the original Concordat on openness in animal research which was launched in May last year and I must say absolutely delighted to see this annual report which is a substantial piece of work and so congratulations to everyone who was involved in it. The Concordat was I think unprecedented because it really did bring together an extraordinary coming together of academia, of industry, of the medical research charities and really many others behind what has turned into a very coherent and tangible program to talk about an issue that's all too often been poorly understood or misrepresented or people have frankly been unwilling to talk about it and so people are sometimes critical they say I concordat well it's just a sort of talking document but actually this is a concordat that really has turned into action and so I'm delighted to be able to be here this evening and help to present some of the prices. So I congratulate really all of the winners tonight and everyone in the hall for the commitment and time that's been invested in this and there will be a lot more to do. So the breadth and the variety of initiatives that have been highlighted this evening shows what a difference everyone is making to finding new and creative ways of explaining why and how animals are used in research as well as the parallel great efforts for the three hours to replace to refine and to reduce their use. So this award is about the use of online and other new media communications which is obviously hugely important because it provides quick regular and easily accessible information materials to anyone who's got an interest and negates the need to always have to work through the media to take advantage of the good offices of Fiona Fox and her colleagues who put on splendid media briefings but that can't be the only way that people have access to information and of course that is the power of the internet and the web. So all of the nominees in tonight's final category have demonstrated great originality and creativity in developing new ways of increasing openness and inviting the scrutiny of animal research online and I really would urge you to look at their websites when you can. So moving to what are the final two awards of the evening then. First of all it gives me great pleasure to invite Imperial College to accept the highly commended award in the category of website and use of new media. So this award recognises the comprehensive and innovative set of web pages that the college has developed in the past year which describe the huge progress made on the management of animal research to Imperial and provide new tools for inviting scrutiny. So who is going to come forward from Imperial College. Finally I'd like to invite the University of Cambridge to accept the winning award in this category and this award is made particularly in recognition of a creative and groundbreaking video posted by the university on YouTube which gives viewers an honest and open insight into the use and care of mice in developing new cancer treatments. So let's congratulate University of Cambridge. Thank you and congratulations to the award winners and that wasn't actually the last award you might have noticed that there is still two things there. And so we'd like to make a special award as well. The Concordat and the current work towards openness in the UK has come about as Simon said through many years of hard work to key people who really have tirelessly campaigned for transparency around animal research and we'd like to recognise one of those people tonight and during the nomination process there were four people who separately contacted UAR and said please will you we really want you to give an award to this person so um so this year and and this is somebody who really has given drive passion and determination and led us to a place where we can talk about our work more freely. So this year we are very pleased to present award to Fiona Fox in recognition for all her work over the years on this issue. Fiona.