Is this the only way forward?
- In 2023, the alliance's favoured law firm had to provide us with a dedicated phone line just to keep up with this sector's legal issues.
- The majority of this sector's legal funds are being eaten up by having to challenge the decisions of licensing officers and local councils.
- DEFRA's zoom calls are performative charades and worthless if they change nothing.
I don't think there's any gain in fighting hundreds of little battles for the rest of our lives when the cause and those responsible for them is clear.
Taking collective action is the only defence we have against DEFRA because no one can afford to take on a recalcitrant and unresponsive government department by themselves.
It's the only way I can see that will replace the entire regulatory framework with something that is universal, has no rating system, provides a licence and can be supported by this industry.
- It must be realtively easy to show that after DEFRA's regulations were introduced, this industry has generated far more requests for legal representation than in any of the previous decades.
- It should be clear that the majority of issues businesses are facing are directly linked to the way the regulations were written, who wrote them and what their objectives were.
- It must be fairly easy to show both incompetence becuase DEFRA had no expertise in our field of business and received no relavent advice and negligence becuase they failed to illicit any reliable science or fact based advice from anyone associated with this industry.
- It must be relatively easy to establish that DEFRA's failure to consult with anyone in this industry is also a duty of care issue because regardless of the CSFG's useless input and total ignorance of our sector, DEFRA were operating way outside of it's knowledge base and owed our industry a legal duty of care and still didn't exercise any good judgement throughout the entire process.
- It should be easy to show that from beginning to end, no one with any relavant expertise was involved and no care was taken from the cut and pastes from other legislation to not even being proof read or checked for feasibility or consequences before it was imposed on our industry.
- It must be realtively easy to show that DEFRA's refusal to accept causality between their regulations and the inability of local authorities to apply them with any consistency is DEFRA's fault, rather than any local authority.
- With a loss of a third of the UK's boarding capacity, it must be easy to show that DEFRA's interminable evasions and foot-dragging has lead to many more financial losses and business closures that if they had taken responsibility for their decisions.
- It must be possible to establish that DEFRA have received hundreds of statements from within our industry concerning actual problems and consequences and that in light of nothing changing that a an intentional decision to ignore that data has been made.
- And we need to establish that the intent to do nothing is a conscious decision because DEFRA's ludicrous refusal to acknowledge or rectify their mistakes is NOT in the public's interests and NOT because they don't know what's wrong, it's because doing nothing is all they can do to protect themselves from being held to account.