Poor NHS funding of IVF means that infertile British couples are among the least likely in Europe to receive the treatment they need to start a family, new official figures have shown.

The latest European league table of access to fertility treatment has placed Britain 11th of 13 countries providing data for 2006, with only Germany and Montenegro providing fewer cycles of IVF in proportion to their population.

Infertile couples in Denmark and Belgium, which finish first and second in the table, are more than three times more likely to have IVF than those living in Britain, the new figures collected by the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology show.

While Denmark conducts 2,337 IVF cycles per million inhabitants and Belgium conducts 2,187, Britain conducts just 729.

The UK’s performance reflects a lack of funding for IVF on the NHS.

While the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) recommends that primary care trusts should offer three free cycles of treatment to most infertile couples, only a quarter meet this standard.

In 2006 only nine of the 161 trusts in England and Wales offered three free cycles. Many trusts also impose further restrictions, such as refusing to fund treatment when people have children from a previous relationship, and the NHS will only pay when women are under the age of 40.

In Denmark and Belgium, up to six cycles of IVF are reimbursed by the state. Other leading performers in the league table, such as Iceland, Finland and Sweden, also offer more generous funding than the UK.

Clare Lewis-Jones, chief executive of the patient group Infertility Network UK, said: “We are angry that although the UK pioneered infertility treatment, we are still among the lowest providers in Europe, and these figures show that availability in the UK is less than one third of that in Denmark.

“To be so far behind other countries in Europe in the provision of fertility treatment is totally intolerable.

“Although there has been an improvement recently in the provision of treatment by some PCTs, there still remains considerable variation in the criteria used to determine whether or not couples can access treatment.”

Anders Nyboe Andersen, of Copenhagen University Hospital in Denmark, who led the research and presented it today at the ESHRE conference in Amsterdam, said that while funding was a major explanation for different countries’ performance, it was not the only one.

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