Halal meat ban by council faces legal challenge
MOSQUES have launched a legal challenge against an English council’s bid to ban “cruel” halal meat in schools.
Lancashire county council was due to introduce a new contract next month that will require schools to serve meat from suppliers that prestun animals before slaughter.
But the move has been put on hold as Lancashire Council of Mosques (LCM) is now seeking a judicial review, claiming the authority did not consult adequately over the decision.
Abdul Hamid Qureshi, the CEO of the LCM, said that if the council refused to backtrack, he would call for a “region-wide boycott” of school meals.
He told The Daily Telegraph: “They reached the decision without any consultation. They should have communicated with the community that are most affected by it. They did not follow the correct process.”
Mr Qureshi added that the Muslim community was “very angry” that the council had branded their faith as “cruel”.
“We can’t accept that position. It is hurtful and negative. Our community really objects to that,” he said. “We will be calling for a boycott of school lunches if the policy goes forward.”
The proposal to ban the practice was introduced by Cllr Geoff Driver, the Conservative leader of Lancashire county council, who has argued that it is “abhorrent” and “really, really cruel” to slaughter animals without stunning them first. In October, a meeting of the full council backed a move not to provide meat to any of its kitchens “unless the animal was stunned before it was slaughtered”.
Lancashire currently supplies 27 schools with “unstunned” halal meat, catering for up to 12,000 children who are served 1.2million meals a year.
Cllr Driver said: “We are due to put on hold the new contract for supply of halal meat to schools. We will continue to supply halal meat under the terms of the current contract while the legal matters are resolved.
“If it is felt that we haven’t consulted appropriately before we made the decision we will do that because we clearly don’t want to either break the law or cause the county council any unnecessary expenditure.”
During a previous attempt by the council to ban non-stunned meat, the LCM urged parents to boycott school meals.
A council report found that the 2013 boycott led to a “significant drop in meal uptake in schools serving both halal and non-halal menus and thus income and contribution”.
It added: “The effect was particularly damaging in the east of the county and the central Preston area where school meal uptake decreased by over 7 per cent.”
British law requires farm animals to be stunned before slaughter, but provides a religious exemption for halal and kosher meat. The Food Standards Agency carried out an animal welfare survey in abattoirs across Britain in 2013. It found about 84 per cent of animals slaughtered by the halal method were stunned before being killed.