DEFRA know nothing about the skills required to run a cattery, our industry's staffing or employment issues, and yet regulated them all!
DEFRA wrote legislation demanding that every cattery employ staff based on arbitrary guest numbers when staffing is the the most difficult issue for the entire industry because:
- it's already virtually impossible to find suitable people to work for a minimum wage at any time of the year.
- catteries tend to operate in two shifts, morning and afternoon, which rarely suits anyone until after they retireme.
- most catteries require an extra pair of hands once a day for 3 hours and this bears no relationship to the number of cats.
- guest numbers fluctuate throughout the year and keeping staff on during winter makes no financial sense.
- finding someone with the necessary high functioning skillsets and ability to work unsupervised for a minimum wage is so rare that it's worth paying them over winter which means there's no spare money for anything else.
- the retention rate for new people is low because the majority of those who apply for work in thinks the job entails playing with cats.
- it takes months to train someone and months more before they can think for themselves and you can trust them to do anything without having to check everything was done properly.
- To run our cattery we have to develop into a fine tuned military machine and everyone involved has to think for themselves.
Everyone has to know what they're doing, when to do it and it only runs like clockwork if no one stands around waiting to be told what to do.
If any one of us has to stop what they were doing to talk to a customer, write out an invoice, or clean sick off the floor, someone else has to pick up the baton, settle the cat, make up the room, fill the bowls and the entire operation has to be right every time to avoid any chaos.
- We have shifts where we've managed the car parking, filled in the new guests' paperwork, chatted to everyone, got all the washing in the washing machine, disinfected the littertrays, steam-cleaned the floors, got half the cats to purr and fed everyone in three hours and in the afternoon we do it again ... and the next day we start again and this goes on for years without a break or day off ... and the rest of every day is spent talking to customers on the phone and taking bookings by email and social media, checking vaccination certificates and doing an average of 6 loads of washing a day in high season.
- But DEFRA has written legislation that mandates that we need to spend time we don't have and money we can't afford by introducing utterly useless paperwork and overpriced qualifications because some ill-advised beauracrats think that we're the ones who need educating about animal welfare!
There was no need to employ any irresponsible elitist thickos to tell us how to run our boarding establishments because the entire industry knows that 99% of what we need to know comes through experience - and for the 1% we don't know, there are private facebook groups, cheap books available, magazines to subscribe to and the internet. - The bottom line is that everthing DEFRA wrote into our regulations they did without consulting anyone in the industry. No one involved understood any part of this sector or anyone working in it and then when DEFRA wrote the regulations they projected all their own ignorance and educational deficiencies onto us and plunged the entire industry into chaos.