Britain's fertility watchdog is poorly organised, inhibits good research and should be abolished, a leading expert in the field said today.

Lord Winston said the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) was "not properly organised", "not giving out proper public information" and should be replaced with a body that is "a great deal less bureaucratic".

He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that scrapping the HFEA might be extreme but "now is the time for parliament to revise what is happening".

To illustrate his argument, Lord Winston cited the recent example of screening techniques for the gene that causes bowel cancer.

"The HFEA didn't even seem to remember that it had given a licence for this treatment 10 years ago ... and it seems to me that if a body is so poorly organised that it can't really remember or communicate what it's supposed to be doing, then really there is a real issue and that is not giving out proper public information."

He called for a new body that would have better public consultation procedures and a process of better inspection.

"We boast of being liberal and we boast that this is a model for other countries to follow, but the fact is no other country in Europe, having looked at the British system, has adopted it. You have to ask the question why? And I think it's because basically it's not seen to be a very good system."

Lord Winston argued that IVF was heavily regulated while other areas of paediatrics were not.

"One has to ask, why single out one particular medical treatment for so much regulation, that is IVF? Not even the whole of infertility is regulated in this way. I would argue that regulatory bodies may well allay public fears but there isn't social science research to prove that.

"It also may be true that public regulatory bodies increase public anxiety because they focus on something, suggesting there may be anxiety when really there isn't any need for it."

The whole range of clinical treatment regulation was difficult to justify, he said.

A foetus with a genetic defect could be aborted without the say-so of any regulatory body, which was "inconsistent" with the law.

Lord Winston rejected arguments that scientists needed regulating so they did not go "too far".

"I think that legislation can deal with that," he said, using cloning as an example of an area that was deemed a criminal offence.

HFEA chairwoman Suzi Leather said she did not agree with Lord Winston "at all".

She told the Today programme: "I think it's certainly true that we are making difficult decisions in a complex and novel area of science and a fraught ethical area of science, but the fact is that we are making decisions in the way parliament has asked us to make them."

She admitted there were difficulties because the legislation was created more than 14 years ago, but argued that regulation had given the public confidence in the infertility treatment sector. Patients knew they were going to be handled "with a decent level of proficiency" and the public knew that doctors and scientists were being independently regulated.

"We have public confidence in the system of regulation and I don't think we should abandon that."

Addressing Lord Winston's specific criticisms, Ms Leather said: "Our bureaucracy costs are lower than what the Treasury sets for regulators in general."

Regulating IVF was "not like regulating gas and electricity prices" because of the important issue of patient confidentiality, she said. However, she acknowledged that science had moved on since the "last time parliament looked at this" in 1990. There was greater choice in selecting embryos, for example for tissue matches, and she had called for parliament to look again at the law.

"I think it is important but at the same time let's remember that the public have confidence in the present system of regulation and if we were going to move to an alternative, what is that going to be?" She said self-regulation was a "deeply flawed model", as was seen with yesterday's criticism of the General Medical Council.

"We know from the reports that come back to us that there are mistakes in IVF treatment and a lot of those mistakes are happening in routine IVF ... So I think the argument that we've been doing IVF for 25 years, and that we should simply abandon regulation because it's a perfectly normal treatment now, is just nonsense."