DEFRA’s incompetence has been known throughout the farming community for decades.
And under the last few Cabinet Ministers its current agglomeration of disparate responsibilities proves that its bureaucrats are incompetent and the department is unmanageable and not fit for any purpose.
And it's under these conditions that DEFRA hatched a plan to take over running every aspect of the UK's Catteries & Kennels.
- DEFRA selected the most ill-suited, inexperienced and most under-qualified people working for local authorities to apply a small novella of untested and unworkable regulations across the country with immediate compliance and no warning or appropriate caveats.
- DEFRA refused to respond to local authority queries and refused to respond to representatives of our sector until long after it was brought up in Parliament - where they were represented by a disgraceful woman who attempted to bullshit her way out of her responsibilities from the people's own dispatch box.
- DEFRA’s regulations malign our entire sector, paint us as unprofessional and unqualified to look after companion animals.
- But it's not us who is malign, unprofessional or unqualified because DEFRA wrote and imposed reams of unjustified corrective measures on our sector by making up absurd and arbitrary regulations to resolve issues that didn't exist.
- And DEFRA failed to consider that despite every licensed boarding establishment in our sector is subjected to annual inspections DEFRA had absolutely no data to suggest that the entire sector needed new regulations or that our sector is routinely and actively engaging in animal abuse.
The regulations were badly drafted, riddled with conflicts and holes and driven by hubris, and not even proof-read before being inflicted on our sector.
- DEFRA based some of its more egregious ideas on misinformation and unprofessional advice provided by the Canine & Feline Sector Group, an inappropriately named charity lobby group with no knowledge or connection with our sector.
- DEFRA could have got away with just being incompetent if DEFRA hadn’t driven our sector to meet and discuss the regulations, confer and expose this shit show.
- We discussed widespread abuse and multiple examples of outrageous conduct by inspectors - we discussed the impact of the unworkable regulations, the open interpretations and conclued that DEFRA were not even half way qualified to write any regulations for any sector.
- We received reports of sexual advances, general thuggery and unprofessional conduct of the newly empowered local authority inspectors who set out to apply regulations that some of them hadn’t read or understood.
- Local authorities sent people with a general level 2 qualification who were not given any specialised training, received no guidance or rules for interpretation, had no limit to their authority and then bungled inspections across the country without providing any appeals process.
This discussion of the Post Office fiasco and the DEFRA debacle is covered in ten short articles:
Part 1,
Part 2,
Part 3,
Part 4,
Part 5,
Part 6,
Part 7,
Part 8,
Part 9,
Part 10