Our sector’s regulations were written by bureaucrats without any oversight, expertise or knowledge of our sector with the primary aim of introducing a Michelin style five star hotel rating system that the public could use to find out about wi-fi or how many pools and restaurants each cattery has available for its guests.
I believe that DEFRA took bureaucratic misfeasance to a whole new level of incompetent and indefensible overreach.
- It looks like DEFRA strayed so far outside of their expertise and official boundaries that we have to assume that DEFRA have never met a boundary that they respected.
- Someone ordered bureaucrats with no expertise or knowledge of the sector to “go do some legislation and learn on the job” and the results were never even proof-read.
- DEFRA clearly had no experience of writing regulations and they asked the lobbyists, the Canine & Feline Sector Group for advice who they knew did not represent or have any knowledge of or connection with anyone in our sector.
- And without any of the necessary knowledge of our sector DEFRA didn’t write regulations to improve animal welfare, they wrote the regulations to justify a rating system that they padded out with dual choices, contradictory rules and box-ticking paperwork.
DEFRA didn’t even bother with any On-the-Job Oversight.
- DEFRA rewrote our regulations and produced an unworkable regulatory framework because there was no oversight or impact assessments and no consultation with anyone in our sector.
- DEFRA forced another set of low-level bureaucrats armed with only a barely relevant level two licensing qualification to interpret the over-complex regulations and award a rating based using a flawed and unworkable framework.
- When it all went wrong DEFRA don’t want to address how so many individual licensing officers formed the same opinion; that their job now included randomly interpreting the regulations and randomly applying sanctions of any severity and degree.
As a simple and reductive overview of why bureaucrats must be exempted from On-the-Job training:
DEFRA chose to reform our industry through regulations. Got confused by a rating system that no one needed. Introduced higher operating costs and reduced efficiency to improve animal welfare - and as a byproduct created space for an unregulated country-wide poorer animal welfare service to operate out of social media - and then DEFRA bureaucrats stood in the way of fixing anything to avoid being held to account.
DEFRA mandated the enforcement of these changes to local authorities - Altering their role from issuing a licence into interpreting a short novella of indefensible regulations that they believed gave them the unprecedented authority to demand financial inputs, withhold licenses and demand closures for minor and insignificant infractions.