DEFRA put all their mistakes in writing - but they are still refusing to take responsibility for writing personally intrusive and nonsensical regulations that increased operating costs and decreased animal welfare!
DEFRA put all their mistakes in writing because there was no industry representation - so they had had no knowledge of who runs catteries or how the industry operates.
In specific terms, the majority of catteries work more hours than a junior doctor for half the current minimum wage and most are run and owned by single people and couples.
Within the context of knowing nothing about our industry, DEFRA's team of incompetents wrote regulations:
- that reduced the time we spend with the animals in our care.
- that introduced an unworkable rating system that only misinforms the public.
- that increased the stress of annual inspections because licensing officers could not apply the new rules consistently or accurately.
- that increased operating costs and workload to provide inconsequential paperwork for licensing officers.
- that caused many irreplacable people to leave the industry taking decades of hard earned knowledge and experience with them.
The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs is supposed to be a professional department with serious responsibilities. But while the cabinet Minister can't take responsibility for or oversee such a wide-ranging brief - In real terms these regulations were written by a team of low-level functionaries with the skills to throw excrement at a fan and the criminal culpability of a gang of teenagers approaching a blank wall with a box of spray paints.
--Cat Whisperer
DEFRA's 26 page regulatory document for catteries is at every level an ill-conceived collection of misinformed and unworkable nonsense:
No competent department would introduce a five star system and then concoct two separate standards for every regulation to differentiate between a five star standard and a three star standard without recognising this as complete nonsense.
No competent department would create a star system to rate businesses that is so complex and arbitrary that no member of the public would ever be able to make sense of how the rating was reached or derive any meaning from it._
No competent department would try to impose a 20th century rating scheme on the public or try to replace social media or google reviews with something worse - the only relevant considerations for the public are staff competence, quality of care and personal experience - All the information that people can find on social media and DEFRA's inspections and regulations can't provide.
--Cat Whisperer
The majority of DEFRA regulations were written by people who didn't have the skills, knowledge or ability to identify their own ignorance. They failed to gather any pertinent information from our sector and failed to challenge the fanciful beliefs of an unrepresentative and ignorant advisory board.
Ultimately, faced with hundreds of complaints and closures, DEFRA still failed to see any of the obvious problems caused by applying or policing nonsensical regulations - And even after DEFRA received industry wide condemnation and reams of evidence exposing their regulations as unfit for purpose, they still refused to recognise that a full retraction of the the entire legislation was the only way to halt the damage they were causing to this industry.
And to make this clear, DEFRA put themselves in charge of regulating every aspect of this sector's private businesses on the erroneous belief that animal welfare and wanton neglect was so widespread thoughout the UK that anything and everything needed to be regulated - and the only thing DEFRA has managed to communicate in the past two years is that they represent a group of useless bureaucrats who are entirely out of touch with reality, unaccountable to the public, and they operate without any consequences for doing a shit job, no incentives for doing a good job and no one takes any responsibility for their own decisions.
It's absolutely incredible that the Minister wasn't held to account - and even more incredible that this entire department wasn't fired and a moritorium halting all inspections and granting 5-stars to every establishment until all of the problems were resolved.
The same poor judgement that engineered the closure of boarding establishments and left communities with no safe or licensed alternatives has continued to screw up despite knowing that they caused the rise in unlicensed alternatives which was in itself lowering the standards of animal welfare - and the only action we've seen is pointless tinkering and minor addendums and changes that licensing officers are still ignoring.
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DEFRA needs to accept that they decided to introduce a 'rating system' that conveys nothing of worth, was not costed or funded and is too complicated for council workers to read or understand.
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DEFRA needs to understand that they tried to regulate an entire industry that is so varied that the opportunity to impose universal 'standards' is almost nil.
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But DEFRA have effectively turned all boarding establishments into prisons for animals and permanent lockdown for owners while reducing the time required to ensure the welfare of the animals - All of which manifested as 26 pages of incompetent drivel that has created more problems than were solved.