DEFRA's 26 page regulatory document for catteries is at every level an ill-conceived collection of misinformed and unworkable drivel:
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 want, but DEFRA's inspections and regulations can't provide.
- DEFRA are a group of bureaucrats who had no relevant experience or understanding of our sector, they face no consequences for doing a shit job, have no incentive to do a good job and no one takes any responsibility for their own decisions.
- DEFRA failed to gather any pertinent information about our sector and failed to challenge the fanciful beliefs of an unrepresentative and ignorant advisory board.
- There's no question that the majority of DEFRA regulations were written by people who didn't have the skills, knowledge or ability to identify their own ignorance, the contradictions or the obvious consequences.
Ultimately, faced with hundreds of complaints and closures, DEFRA still failed to ackowledge or fix 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 act or 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 without consulting anyone in our sector. Someone decided that animal welfare and wanton neglect was so widespread thoughout the UK that anything and everything needed to be regulated - and when this all went wrong, the only thing DEFRA has managed to communicate to our industry in the past two years is that they represent a group of useless bureaucrats who are entirely out of touch with reality and unaccountable to anyone.