Fellows of the Royal Society aren't supposed to shriek. But that's what one did at a public meeting recently when I leapt onto my hobbyhorse: fraud in science. The establishment don't want to know. An FRS in the audience – a professor of structural biology – practically vaulted across the room in full cry. What got this guy's goat was my suggestion that scientists are no more trustworthy than restaurant managers or athletes.

Restaurant kitchens are checked because some of them are dirty. Athletes are drug-tested because some of them cheat. Old people's homes, hospitals and centres for the disabled are subjected to random inspections. But oh-so-lofty scientists plough on unperturbed by the darker suspicions of our time.

"We have reproducibility," the FRS hollered, above others yelling the same in my direction. "You can come and inspect our labs any time."

I've seen this reaction now from Glasgow to Sussex (although it was in Sussex they seemed most likely to hit me). There's no appetite, unsurprisingly, for more regulation in science, and the deeper into the establishment you go, the more they dread it.

They've got a "method", they say, which separates true from false, like a sheep gate minded by angels.

"It is important to recognise that in the long term it matters little if published material is inaccurate, incompetent or even fraudulent, since the advance of the scientific canon only uses that material which turns out to fit the gradually emerging jigsaw," is how Dr David Taylor, a former executive at AstraZeneca, expressed this tenet in a recent submission to the House of Commons science and technology committee, which publishes a report today.

I feel for that committee's members, who were probing the topic of peer review. Not for them the televised grilling of Murdoch and Son, or the swansongs of chief police officers. Instead, for five months, they've struggled with the establishment from a culture too arcane to excite attention.

They heard, of course, that there's no evidence of a problem: no proof of much fraud in science. Publishing behemoth Reed Elsevier, for example, observed that of 260,000 articles it pumps out in a year, it will typically retract just 70. And for nearly all of these the reason was that the stuff was "plain wrong", not because it was shown to be dishonest.

This sounds like the old Vatican line about priests and child abuse. Or Scotland Yard and tabloid phone-hacking. And, although I know that the plural of "anecdote" isn't "data", the anecdotes of science fraud are stacking up.

"Scientific discoveries that later turn out to be flagrant episodes of dishonesty – from Woo-Suk Hwang's fabricated claims in Science about cloning embryonic stem cells to Andrew Wakefield's falsifications in The Lancet – are not uncommon," the editor of The Lancet, Richard Horton, told the committee.

And the committee took notice. In its report today, it calls for serious action, not on peer review but on fraud. "Although it is not the role of peer review to police research integrity and identify fraud or misconduct," the committee's chair, Labour MP Andrew Miller said yesterday, "we found the general oversight of research integrity in the UK to be unsatisfactory and complaisant."

Complaisant? It means eager to please or obliging. But eager to please whom? Well, scientists. It's like another cosy community where institutional advantage breeds indifference to misconduct down the line.

"Employers must take responsibility for the integrity of their employees' research," the committee says, in words that eerily echo the storm over ethics in red-top journalism. "However, we question who would oversee the employer and make sure that they are doing the right thing."

The answer isn't lengthy, but what it lacks in proportions, it makes up for in political sensitivity. For the remedy – which I think is obvious to any detached observer – invokes the "R" word, which until this summer sounded so discordant.

"In the same way that there is an external regulator overseeing health and safety, we consider that there should be an external regulator overseeing research integrity," says the committee's report. "We recommend that the government set out proposals on the scope and powers of such a regulator and consult with the research community and other relevant parties to develop them."

One proposed element is for universities and other institutions to designate a staff member responsible for integrity. Another is a central agency – not part of government – to set standards and help root out wrongdoing. It's much the same as what they have in the United States, and Miller, who is backed unanimously by the 11-member committee, believes the time is right for it here.

"I'm a past chairman of the Commons regulatory reform committee," he told me last night, to emphasise his "light touch" credentials. "We aren't looking for a heavy-handed role, but one that just quietly takes away some of the risk to the system."

The fellows of the Royal Society, I'm sure, won't like it.

Brian Deer is the UK specialist reporter of the year