If there are no known financial advantages, and the inspection criteria is beyond rescue, then the entire industry should go license free.
Decades ago being 'FAB listed' meant that commercial boarding catteries would agree to abide by a set of criteria written by our industry - and even though this is a long defunct organisation and the listing utterly meaningless, catteries still proudly display the logo because it’s an easily recognised trademark of quality.
Today, nothing is voluntary because DEFRA dictates that a privately owned licensed cattery cannot do anything if doing so conflicts with any regulation that these ass-hats can dream up.
DEFRA screws over other industries too. Our sector uses disinfectants like they're going out of fashion - The chemical companies have various products, some virucidal, others bacterial and others that kill all known pathogens - But only some are "DEFRA approved" and that's because because no company wants to waste all their profits on a slew of DEFRA approvals that will never provide any return on investment because "DEFRA approved" adds little value to any product.
"Today, agreeing to be licensed means that you are bound by all of DEFRA's regulations - without having a say in what those regulations entail - without any influence over the implementation - without any recourse to appeal a local authority's interpretation."
"We’ve already paid through taxation for the regulations to be written. Then we pay random or exorbitant rates for the inspections at levels determined entirely by individual local authorities - and for this, we get more stress and more expenses and receive absolutely nothing in return because the public don’t even know or care that catteries are licensed or inspected."
Is DEFRA the dumping ground for every rejected civil servant?
It's quite clear that running a dog-walking or cat-sitting enterprise from facebook doesn't provide the same care - and it's clear that it's way more profitable than a licensed cattery because there are virtually no overheads - but local authorities don't have the resources or interest in catching up with them so DEFRA have reduced their overall control of our sector and reduced by a significant percentage whatever animal welfare they were planning to improve.
An unlicensed cattery has service advantages as well. While I've no direct experience of using an unlicensed cattery, they can provide any service they like, leave the premises whenever they like, go to the pub, provide an income and decide on whatever work/life balance they want. All of the things that owning your own business provides but a license prevents.
An unlicensed premesis will be liable for the same taxes as us, they are likely to be within their rights to treat our licensing officers as trespassers, but proper insurance might be problematic and so endangers the animals in their care.