DEFRA: Making up the regulations and fixing the science around their arrogance …
DEFRA clearly overstepped their bounds when they legislated to control the private lives of business owners - They made the absurd decision to impose costly, physically restrictive and mentally damaging legislation on private business and made ill-health a choice in exchange for a higher rating!
And while DEFRA have convinced themselves that they wield this authority, that there was rampant animal abuse in our sector and that they had a brief to rewrite our legislation to improve cat welfare … every observable reality and all empirical evidence suggests that DEFRA had absolutely no idea what they were doing and have (probably) delivered the most useless regulations in democratic history.
- DEFRA were clearly making up solutions to problems that didn’t exist and inventing others that were not universally applicable.
- Not a single number or measurement found in DEFRA’s discredited and useless legislation can be traced back to any legitimate or scientific source.
- DEFRA wrote two standards for a rating system that tells no one anything and every single standard, lower or higher was made up by government officials to justify the ratings.
- Every single rule and regulation was made up by government officials without any assessment of impact, foresight or thought for consequences.
- Every single number and measurement was plucked from their arses to support a formulaic regulatory framework which broke the sector, raised costs and lowered the standard of animal welfare across the country.
And this is where we are today:
The regulations have not provided consistent ratings across the country and the public has no idea what the differences are between a 3 star or 5 star establishment.
A licensing officer could find rat droppings on the work surface in a restaurant, the owners could close down, bait the place, kill the freeloaders and reopen.
But local authority licensing officers have assumed that they are allowed to close business down or demand a £60k remodelling job on the basis of an arbitrary number that should never have been included in the regulations at all.