We should label all cruel slaughter practices, not just religious ones

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In the UK there should be a simple labelling system that lets customers know whether the animal has been slaughtered without stunning (Sebastien Bozon/AFP/Getty)

The British Veterinary Association (BVA) backs Stanley Johnson’s calls for “informed consumer choice” to allow purchasers of meat and fish to choose products where the animals have been humanely slaughtered. However, while we support Johnson’s calls for labelling, we would emphasise that any such labelling should be focused – as our campaign to end non-stun slaughter has been – on welfare at slaughter and not on religious slaughter, particularly as over 80 per cent of halal meat is stunned before slaughter. As Johnson suggests, as long as non-stun slaughter remains permissible in the UK there should be a simple labelling system that lets customers know whether the animal has been slaughtered without stunning or if it has been stunned prior to slaughter, rendering it insensible to pain.

Sean Wensley

President, British Veterinary Association

London

Industrialising the housing sector

Ben Chu is right to say (Monday 8th) that the Government needs to stop “right to buy” to housing association tenants and let local authorities (and Government departments) provide the land and build directly if we are to attempt to solve the dire housing crisis, especially for affordable housing, in this country.

But that is only part of the answer as is freeing up house building land via more realistic approaches to planning laws. The other part of the answer is for the building industry to adopt much more modern methods of building. Currently we (mostly) build houses in muddy fields by putting brick on brick as we have done for well over 100 years; is it any wonder we cannot build enough and quality issues abound?

The building sector is only partly industrialised – at component level – much like the car industry was at the start of the 20th century. Then, when Ford introduced assembly line production, the cost of a car fell to a third, and within a decade it halved again. Today’s modern car plants such as Nissan, Toyota and BMW, are all producing excellent quality in large volumes but house building remains, generally, where the car factories were in the early days of Ford.

If the building industry could take home construction from its partially to fully industrialised basis, encouraged by government and local authorities who would stand to gain substantial cost savings plus much improved quality, then we would have the opportunity to substantially increase the numbers of houses and flats built. The method is called volumetric construction, or off-site construction, and is well known but vastly under-utilised in this country.

Paul R Draper

Winchester

Drones

I agree with Professor Dunn that more needs to be done to make drone operators accountable. The first step needs to be greater education, with the vast majority of drone enthusiasts still unaware of when and where they can fly UAVs. There is free technology available that not only maps out all the no-fly zones, but includes real-time updates ensuring operators have the latest airspace information to hand and can even receive alerts about manned aviation entering their vicinity.

While at present these safeguards, with some manufacturers building simplistic versions of these in, it would be a sensible next step to make it compulsory to include pre-installed personalised live geo-fencing in all drones to help operators become safer, legal pilots.

To go one step further and continue the UK’s leading position in the drone industry, the Government should follow a refined version of the USA and Irish models, making drone registration compulsory, along with new legislation that ensures all drones are fitted with a black-box type unit that captures telemetry data that can be made available to the authorities.

Richard Parker

Reading