And the 2022 Emporer Nero award goes to DEFRA for setting fire to our industry, then fiddling while our industry burns ...
The regulations were not written because there were any welfare issues with catteries and kennels, but because DEFRA wrote their own brief - But it all went wrong because they didn't talk to anyone in this industry - And despite not having any relevant experience and not being fit or equipped to write regulations for any commercial boarding establishments, DEFRA wrote 26 pages of drivelling, unpoliceable, contradictory and non-universal regulations.
The results of the application of these untested and unchecked regulations caused the closure of many successful businesses and the space was necessarily filled with uninsured, unregulated and untrained operations attracting our industry's customers through social media.
Local authorities do not have the resources to track down the burgeoning mass of rogue and unlicensed operators that were created by DEFRA's inept decisions and subsequent inaction and rather than improve animal welfare, DEFRA have single-handedly lowered the standards of animal welfare accross the country.
Professional fiddlers ...
- DEFRA has no legitimate claim to govern this sector and in three years have only managed to award our industry's representatives the ludicrous and pointless title of "stakeholder".
- Every syllable of DEFRA's regulations have been used by local authorities to justify everything from demanding massive capital investment to closing businesses down and refusing licenses throughout the country.
- DEFRA's foot-dragging consists of pretending to be conducting a "review" into the consequences when they all should have been fired for their lack of due diligence and incompetence.
And the same people whose mistakes decimated a decades old UK industry are currently trying to avoid responsibility and retain as many regulations as possible because doing anything would be an admission of their incompetence.