In 2011 we bought a dilapidated and run down cattery with very few forward bookings, a tiny user base and virtually no maintenance being carried out for years.
We built it up into a thriving business and in 2019, DEFRA ruined the industry, removed all the joy out of the job, and harmed the cats in our care.
Don't start a cattery in the UK until you've read this:
The following exposé would be better entitled "Since DEFRA were put in charge, the entire industry has turned to shit."
Because it explains how this industry became toxic and why so many people have given up running catteries and kennels over the last few years.
To have survived the last three years in this industry you needed luck and financial resilience:
- You needed your local authority licensing officer to exercise common sense or at least not be a jack-booted authoritarian thug.
- You needed your local authority to work out that catteries and kennels were central to UK tourism and were eligible for Covid travel restriction grants because without travel, no one needs a cattery.
- Or you needed a healthy bank balance or some other source of income to replace lost income during Covid.
If I recorded only a small fraction of the issues and incidents we know about it would suggest that if you're thinking of opening a dream hotel for cats, the current advice would be to leave the dream where it is.
Overview
The following highlights how this industry sector has become toxic because a government department with no relavent experience of the tourism industry decided to rewrite our regulations without any practical knowledge of the industry and without consultation with anyone in the industry.
In more hyperbolic terms, a tiny group of ill-advised and ill-educated London based pen-pushers turned a vital sector of the UK's tourism supply chain into a country-wide shitshow - Not because it was needed, but because they could - and following this decision, turned all catteries and kennels from private businesses into the fiefdoms of semi-literate council employees to impose a rating system that was unfit for purpose.
DEFRA gave local authorities the power to demand structural changes to buildings, administration and staffing levels without providing any funding subsidies, sufficient timescales or appeals process. And they closed down catteries and kennels without providing compensation or alternatives for holiday-makers already booked in and didn't even consider that many of the self-employed or their families rely on income to pay mortgages.
The fact is that DEFRA enforced their ill-considered regulations using untrained and uneducated council sociopaths who have no relevant experience in tourism, business or animal welfare - and whose only qualification is a generic licensing course that provides none of the necessary insight, skills or knowledge to apply DEFRA's incomprehensible and overreaching regulations with any accuracy or consistency.
These regulations were imposed on this industry without any consultation with this industry and without any peer-review.
DEFRA introduced mandatory animal cruelty, demanded everyone adopt the sort of pointless and inefficient working practices that every resource wasting government department exists for - and then demanded damaging financial inputs to pay for unnecessary refits and refurbishments that have no scientific backing or industry support.
When all's said and done all these people needed to do to correct their mistakes was listen to the experts and act.
And despite holding direct talks with those responsible for creating this mess, almost nothing has changed and no one has been fired. No one from the vicious little thugs employed by local authorites to mete out sanctions and threaten closures to the over-paid cabinet ministers barely aware of their own briefs have taken any steps to address their responsibilities, failures or the consequences.
Once you get into the details, we find that no one involved has the basic human decency to accept what they did was indefensible or acknowledge why it went wrong - the royal patronage and tax-exempted advisors on the CFSG wont talk to our industry representatives because they know that they failed to represent this indutry's interests - the writers of the regulations refuse to accept responsibility for their incompetence or the consequences - and the usual local authority clown show of lies and denials to protect officials who've interpreted our regulations to mean anything they want delegitimises the entire process.
No council employee should have the authority to decide when or how a private boarding establishment can operate - especially when their subjective judgements include inconsequential and irrelavent regulations such as whether a room is a cm too small or a degree too cold or not having a scratching post the right shape and position - councils have no appeals process in place to rectify their ignorance or mistakes and we're forced to use legal channels to deal with them and all they do is misuse more tax revenues to cover up their mistakes and incompetence.
I don't want this to be an excoriation of every buraucratic system ever devised, but it's hard to ignore the fact that this industry had been focussed solely on looking after animals for people for decades without any major interference - And within minutes of DEFRA's involvement, the entire sector was thrown into one crisis after another.
No government can impose new regulations without consultation.
Businesses create a necessary and accountable internal bureaucracy that is meant to oil the wheels and improve efficiency of the productive staff - But people who thrive in government bureaucracies are not motivated to do a good job because they risk nothing and still receive a guaranteed income.
The quality of their work will never improve because there is no profit motive and their productivity is measured in how much paperwork that they can create - And so government bureacracies breed the most ineffectual, inefficient, irresponsible, intransigent, unproductive and wasteful people in any workforce.
But even if that wasn't true in every case, these bureaucracies wrote and imposed wholly impractical, unpoliceable, non-universal regulations on a business sector that they failed to consult - So they had to imagine the outcome of all their theoretic regulations and imagine that everything they wrote was going to improve animal welfare - But they didn't have any relavent working experience, practical knowledge, data or foresight and so ended up replacing more of the limited time we can spent on animal welfare with mindless and meaningless buraucracy.
To sum up the enforcement situation, DEFRA wrote a thoroughly discredited 26 page document chock full of of unworkable, incoherent and contradictory rules and standards - and coucil employees were given the authority to close down, bankrupt or destroy the reputation of a 30 year old business for any inconsequential infraction ... and now no one is responsible for anything they did, their own decisions or the consequences of their actions.