Today in a spare moment, I have been dealing with post that arrived some time ago and has mounted up. Papers that arrive in clear plastic envelopes and are clearly non-urgent are carefully filed until I have enough spare time to deal with them properly. Amongst those are Total Politics, What’s Brewing? and Lib Dem News (although that at least arrives in an environmentally and post office-friendly C5 brown paper envelope). When I came to deal with the pile, I also found a mailing from last year from the Cats Protection League including raffle tickets that had to be returned by mid-December. Whoops.

Whilst I was going through all these envelopes – and for the most part recycling them unread, sorry! – I found a headline on the Cats Prot mailing that caught my eye: MPs call for action.

The story was about an EDM tabled in the last Parliament calling for action from local authorities – so as a councillor, I was hooked from the start. The rather gruesome EDM pointed out that local authorities are responsible for removing from the road the bodies of animals killed in traffic accidents. Then the EDM called on local authorities to invest in microchip scanners so that they could check to see whether those animals were cared-for pets with registered owners.

It does make sense. If your cat is killed on the road, unless it happens right outside your house, you may never know. So all you know is that your cat has wandered off and not returned. If your local council were to find your cat, the chances are you’d never hear about it. So urging authorities to invest a very small amount in microchip scanners could do a fair bit for the peace of mind of the owners of missing pets.

The initial EDM referred to in the magazine closed when Parliament changed session last November, but the campaign has been resurrected in the new Parliamentary session as EDM 126, tabled by our own Mike Hancock MP. The new EDM has not yet attracted as many signatures as its predecessor, so do urge your own MP to sign it if you agree, and if you’re fortunate enough to also be a councillor, why not find out what your authority does about this issue?