The fertility expert Robert Winston has attacked the IVF regulatory system, calling it over-bureaucratic and poorly organised.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) ought to be abolished and replaced by a more flexible regime, he said yesterday, while the law governing assisted reproduction could be rewritten.

Lord Winston, of Hammersmith hospital, London, told BBC radio's Today programme that there should be a more efficient body "which doesn't inhibit research, which has a better consultation process with the public and which has a much more adequate inspection process. It is time for parliament to revise what is happening."

The HFEA was established in 1991, 13 years after the birth of the first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, but a government review of its role and the legislation that established it has sparked a debate about whether the one body can, or should, consider ethics, regulate embryo research and license fertility clinics. It is widely assumed that the work of the HFEA will be taken over by the proposed Human Tissue Authority.

Some critics question whether it has kept up with technological advances. It has had to adjudicate on several controversial issues, including sex selection and genetically selected babies whose tissue might aid a sick sibling, and it recently proposed compensating egg and sperm donors.

Only last month, a working group of the government-funded Medical Research Council said evidence that IVF was safe in the long-term for babies and mothers was still "relatively weak".

Lord Winston conceded that the HFEA consisted of "good, well-meaning people". But he pointed out that it recently appeared to have forgotten that it had licensed research to screen embryos for a bowel cancer gene 10 years ago, or that studies on the treatment had been published eight years ago. If such a body could not remember or communicate what it was supposed to be doing, it was not putting out proper public information.

There was also a conflict of interest in the way it used practitioners running clinics to inspect the system. The bureaucratic supervision of clinical treatments was also hard to justify. "One has to ask the question: why single out one particular treatment for so much regulation?"

He rejected suggestions that scientists needed regulating in case they went too far. Doctors could abort any foetus without regulatory authority, provided it carried a gene defect. "There is no need to have a regulatory body to regulate cloning because it is a criminal offence. If you do clone a human person, you would be bound to be found out and put in prison."

He suggested that, rather than reassuring the public, the existence of the HFEA might have the opposite effect. "It may also be true that public regulatory bodies increase public anxiety because they focus on something, suggesting there is anxiety when really there isn't any need for it."

Suzi Leather, who chairs the authority, defended its work. "We are making difficult decisions in a complex and novel area of science and a fraught ethical area of science."

Having a regulator had given the public confidence over fertility issues, although she said that parliament needed to consider such matters again. "Science has moved on very fast. Some of the treatments were not envisaged when parliament last looked at this."

Geraldine Hartshorne, the secretary of the Association of Clinical Embryologists, agreed that the authority had provided public reassurance. "It also provides a framework where researchers and doctors know what they can and can't do," she said. "It is widely acknowledged to be the best regulated in the world."