Part 3 - DEFRA's Regulations
Higher standards Businesses that meet the higher standard will get a 4 or 5 star rating in the animals activity star rating system. Higher standards are required or optional. To achieve a higher rating, businesses boarding cats need to achieve:
- 100% of the required higher standards
- at least 50% of the optional higher standards If a business meets the higher standards, it will qualify for a longer licence that’s valid for 2 or 3 years rather than one year. This lowers the cost of the licence.
All of these pseudo-regulations are too complicated and “standards” consist of whatever arbitrary bullshit they could imagine - no regulation can replace quality of care, no education can replace experience and no regulation can foresee or prevent accidents.
When we have a flood, we don’t call an electrician and when someone wanted to rewrite the regulations for a sector in the supply chain for tourism, no one with any credibility would contact DEFRA.
DEFRA have overseen a degradation of the environment and rural affairs through a mixture of institutional ignorance, rampant mismanagement, political corruption and multiple conflicts of interest.
But even if the skillset required to increase food insecurity, raise farmer suicide rates, mismanage forestry or grant private companies the right to pollute our beaches and rivers was transferable, what we actually need is Higher standards at DEFRA.
We need a reduction in overreach, an independent appeals process with the ability to impose monetary and compensatory sanctions on incompetent departments and preferably an end to all local authority involvement in any area of business at all.
A minimum standard of “being fit for purpose” needs to be imposed on all government departments because without being able to manage your own responsibilities the last thing you need to base enforcement on is empowering incompetent local authorities to laud it over successful businesses isn’t a solution to any problem dreamt up by DEFRA.
Why are aren’t there minimum standards for DEFRA?
Why is there no accreditation system where local authorities are graded on performance, services and wastage so that the public and businesses know which areas and councils should be avoided?
The public can’t be expected to pay for this endless loop of constant failure or have people who have been involved in and supported constant failure their entire careers to have the opportunity to cover up the next generation's failures.
In amongst all the insane shit DEFRA came up with is that if we are 5 stars we don’t need to be inspected for three years … and we get a discount from the council for doing nothing … which represents a saving that won’t even cover the annual increases in council tax that are demanded each year to provide poorer services.
When in reality DEFRA’s regulations are so poorly written, researched and implemented that if anyone reaches the higher standard, there’s no need for any further inspections because virtually nothing will ever lower the rating.
There’s virtually no route for any 3 star cattery to reach a 5 star standard, so the entire process and the entire structure of the regulations is pointless. And if raising ’standards’ isn’t possible, the star rating must be suspended and all licenses must be renewed automatically and free of charge until the system can be shown to work for all catteries.
This discussion of DEFRA's regulation fiasco 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