Not a single cattery or cattery owner thinks the same way or runs their cattery in the same way.
No cattery is started for the same reasons or by the same type of person.
Some people have family commitments and some are free to dedicate themselves to looking after cats every waking hour.
Boarding establishments can range from huge stand alone catteries with permanent staff, to suburban single women running a six pen hotel for the love of cats and there are dozens of add-on catteries attached to Kennels with as many variations as there are people running them.
Every business operates on different criteria, has different aims and has different skills and different qualities of service, none of which needs to be inspected or regulated because in our industry our customers can go somewhere else.
The advisory board should have restricted itself to writing advisories to help new catteries engage in best practices, because without any of the necessary caveats, opt-outs and exclusions the regulations are unworkable.
DEFRA introduced new regulations that if adopted by the NHS would grind healthcare in the UK to a halt with unnecessary paperwork, making everyone's work day longer and reducing any benefit for the patients.
Most smaller catteries cannot afford part-time employment and many larger catteries cannot offer anyone full-time employment and remain profitable.
Most cattery owners earn way below the minimum wage and most catteries work more hours than a junior Doctor but do not reach the 10K threshold you need to pay income tax.
The advisory board created a regulatory requirement for staff to guest ratios that would force some catteries to find full-time helpers who would need to be paid at a higher rate than the owners and reduce the owner's income and profitability by an equivalent amount.
DEFRA requires an arbitrary ratio of staff to cats - But if every cattery expansion requires extra staff, there's no financial benefit to expansion - and if all of the possible benefit from expansion is spent entirely on wages, then there's no incentive to expand. QED, DEFRA's regulations prevent anyone from expanding and capped the size of any existing cattery for the sake of writing an arbitrary regulation.
Every major industry receives updated regulations from time to time, but to my knowledge none are ever applied retrospectively. But DEFRA wrote regulations that were incompatible with older regulations and allowed local authorities to demand alterations even though catteries have been built over decades using different materials and to different specifications.
While it's relatively easy for a large VAT registered kennels to invest in major alterations, for small catteries there is no spare cash for complying with uncosted and unfunded regulations - and without any provisions for exempting smaller catteries, older catteries or the low paid, there can be no legitimate enforcement of the regulations if the only options for many was borrow money or face closure.
