It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Havard, and to follow the hon. Members for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs Ellman) and for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood), who succinctly set out the positions of the Jewish and Muslim faiths on the stunning and non-stunning of meat. It is always useful to debate a range of subjects, but this debate seems to involve a sense of déjà vu. We discussed the issue on 4 November, and I see present Members who contributed to that debate, along with others. Indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone) chaired that debate. I am surprised that the issue has come around for discussion again so quickly. If former and current Ministers did not already know the range of views on this matter, we have made them very clear over the years.
I want to say a few words about why I certainly do not support the e-petition. I have several thousand Muslim and Jewish constituents, and I am representing their point of view. I am also against stunning because of my own view about animal welfare. I have been a vegetarian for the past 32 years. I can assure Members that I am not squeamish about killing animals: on occasion, animal welfare necessitates the death of animals. I have, in the recent past, put animals—particularly rabbits —out of their misery when I felt that their poor quality of life required action, so I feel that I speak on animal welfare with some authority. The hon. Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes) suggested in an intervention that perhaps more people should go vegan or vegetarian. Sometimes, when the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) suggests that we should have a day in Parliament each year when people do not eat meat, she is ridiculed. That is wrong.
In preparing for this speech, I looked at the amount of meat that is consumed in this country. We have already heard about the glut of meat in the market. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has consulted on the consumption habits of the British public for the past 20 years. In the last year for which the figures are known, people consumed around 190 grams of chicken each week. If we multiply that figure by 52, we get around 9.8 kg—almost 10 kg of chicken every year. If broilers are slaughtered at eight weeks and the average carcass weight is around 1.8 kg, that means that some people, at least, are eating at least six chickens a year. If we extrapolate those figures, we come to the view that every year in the UK approximately 2.6 million cattle, 10 million pigs, 14.5 million sheep and lambs, 80 million fish and 950 million birds are slaughtered for human consumption. I have to ask: why are we consuming so much meat?
I will contradict some of my colleagues in saying that shechita accounts for only 1% of the totals that I just read out, and it is incorrect to say that it enters the food
chain: it does not. There are approximately 300,000 Jewish people in this country, and the meat produced for them goes to the community itself. The Beth Din already label kosher meat.