Human Tissue Authority publishes 2025/26 annual review

The Human Tissue Authority’s annual review outlines our regulatory work and progress against our three-year strategy. 2025/26 demonstrated that a small, focused organisation can deliver meaningful regulatory impact.

HTA licence holders work in Anatomy; Human Application; Organ Donation and Transplant; Post Mortem; Public Display; and Research. In 2025/26 we inspected around a quarter of these establishments, with 226 inspections and exceeding our target of 222 inspections.

We extended incident reporting to the Anatomy sector and continued our programme of unannounced inspections for the Post Mortem sector. We have also been adapting our regulatory approach, with more use of evaluated self-assessments (ESAs) where the risks are low. In 2025/26, we assessed half of the 14 licensed establishments in the Public Display sector in this way.

We have a unique role as a regulator, deciding on all cases of living organ donation in the UK. In 2025/26 we approved 1,165 living organ donations. This represents a steady increase of almost 10% since 2022/23, continuing the recovery seen since living organ donations fell sharply during the Covid-19 pandemic. We also approved 69 donations of bone marrow and peripheral blood stem cells from children who were not competent to consent.

This is also our last annual review with our current Chair, Lynne Berry CBE. We are immensely grateful for her leadership and contributions to HTA.

Read the 2025/26 annual review.