Animal Welfare Standards

Lord Rooker Excerpts

Wednesday 12th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

Does the Minister not appreciate that there is no international body for certifying halal? That is why, in New Zealand, the halal authority agrees to pre-stunning. She cannot hide behind the EU, because the EU allows into Europe all the New Zealand lamb—and all of it that comes to the UK is halal, without exception. If the EU allows that in, we cannot then use the EU rules to stop our own people here deciding that we will have a halal authority which still gives the certification but allows for pre-stunning. That is the root cause of the problem: Defra should make sure that there is a halal body prepared to do that in this country, otherwise we simply would not allow the exports.

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

The noble Lord is right. There is no one national authority that certifies halal meat, and to a certain extent that is part of the problem. We have one halal authority which will certify only stunned meat, one that does only non-stunned meat and one that does both. The crux of this issue is that the Government, stakeholders and religious authorities need to start working together more closely to look at the research around stunning, which has come on in leaps and bounds in terms of recoverability from stunning and therefore whether it falls within religious guidelines. We have committed to do that and we will continue to do so.