How to create an insulting and worthless rating system at the same time as financially harming small businesses across the country and creating no benefits for the animals in our care.
Given that hundreds of inspections have been carried out and because so many have been botched, bungled or randomly applied, it's relavent to ask the question:
"Are all Licensing Officers cat-shit crazy, mentally vacuous or incompetent or is their excuse always going to be that they were "just carrying out DEFRA's orders?"
- DEFRA wrote every regulation with two standards, but doesn't provide licensing officers with any guidance to interpret the results.
- DEFRA provides no route for clarifiaction and refuse to be involved in holding local councils to account.
- So there's nothing to prevent LO's from interpreting the regulations in any way they like and we've various examples of LO's just making them up as they went along.
A simple hypothetical scenario that illustrates the idiocy of a rating system no one asked for and no one needed:
Let's say that DEFRA has 50 dual-standard regulations and a cattery achieves the 5-star standard for 49 of them and one obscure and insignificant one comes in at a 3 star standard. If your licensing officer is a raging sociopath, they could dock two stars from your business because you failed to reach the higher standard.
And just as insane is that someone who scored just over 50% of the higher standards could be interpreted as exceeding the three-star standard but not reaching the five-star standard so the licensing officer could award either rating.
DEFRA created these regulations so that the public could be better informed, but it doesn't tell anyone anything if:
- someone with zero previous experience or a retired vet both start a cattery and both are awarded 2-stars because DEFRA decided to base the rating system on the age of the PVC rather than the experience of the owner.
- someone with 20 years of experience could be reduced to 3-stars without any deficiency or change in practices simply because they did not have the time or money to spend on any pointless online qualifications.
- and because licensing is a post code lottery, one licensing officer could award one cattery 5 stars because the place looked clean and another might recognise that the regulations had been scrawled on the back of a napkin during a drunken lunch break as a prank rather than a serious attempt to improve cat welfare.