Halal school dinners farce is a sorry affair
WHILE LCC has been grappling with, essentially, remaining in business, council leader Geoff Driver has been crusading against the use of certain sorts of Halal meats in school dinners.
It wasn’t an election issue, but suddenly became an issue wen Cllr Driver said he wanted to make sure Halal meat which has not been stunned prior to slaughter was not served in schools.
This was almost a year ago, when the council’s cabinet started discussing the idea in private.
It soon faced a legal challenge over the way it had initially consulted on the proposals, and carried out another consultation.
A total of 8,500 replied to the consultation, of which 1,300 did so using guidance from the Lancashire Council of Mosques.
Ninety per cent of respondents were against the proposal from LCC.
In a press release, Cllr Driver said: “We know people have strong views on this issue and I’m grateful that more than 8,500 people have taken the time to respond to the consultation.
“The responses have been analysed by an independent market research company to ensure that cabinet has a full understanding of those responses, and how people are affected by the council’s policy on this issue.”
And then promptly disregarded the thoughts of the majority who got in contact and carried on with the ban regardless.
The ridiculous thing about so much effort on this is that it won’t actually remove nonstunned Halal meat from school menus where there are children whose religious beliefs mean they will only eat such meat. Schools are legally obliged to provide meals for all students, so LCC simply runs the risk of more schools axing their contracts for school meals with the county council and going elsewhere.
Which, at a time when the county council has to find millions of pounds in savings, must make this a very important point of principle for someone, somewhere.
Indeed, Cllr Driver now faces the risk of the Lancashire Council of Mosques encouraging families to boycott school meals.
Cllr Driver says that ‘wouldn’t be in anybody’s interests’. You could say the same about this whole sorry affair.
It’s eight months of debate which results only in LCC’s school meals service being less attractive to the 27 schools which currently rely on it for Halal meat.