DEFRA wrote regulations without any understanding of the practicalities, such as:
- Could any of the unjustified refurbs or rebuilds be afforded by low-income businesses?
- Were the regulations applicable across all establishments or should buildings that were built under previous regulations have been exempted from any changes?
- Or could the regulations be applied by any local authority licensing officer with any confidence, consistency or accuracy?
_The bottom line here is that DEFRA's calamatous regulations have reduced profitiability, damaged this industry and the people working in it for absolutely no benefits for the animals in our care.
If the DEFRA brief had been to focus on a three page document with an educational advisory on hygiene, an annual inspection, a licence and no star rating they’d have fulfilled the objectives, the regulations would have been more effective and no one would have been constructively forced to close down.
It's important to see this from the political science point of view - the problem with all governments is that no government department can resolve problems without the right advice, and with the wrong advice is perfectly structured and placed to create new ones.
Government departments assume autocratic power to serve the public under the guise of improving lives for groups of individuals. But there is no average individual and individuals by themselves have no intrinsic value to any government.
But the entire system is corrupted because the process of legislation encourages monied interests to lobby for legislation to favour themselves, and so government departments only receive advice by from self-interested lobbyists posing as advisors.
… at least in this case we know that DEFRA failed to achieve their objectives, not because they were lobbied to work against the pubic's interests, but because they had the wrong advice because they listened to the wrong advisors and made up the rest to solve problems that didn't exist.