We learned on the job that local authorities employ one licensing officer with a non-sector-specific level two qualification who doesn’t need to have any relevant experience of the sector to be an inspector - and DEFRA handed them the impossible task of improving animal welfare with an unworkable rating system, double standard regulations and no guidance.
- Bureaucracies have one rule when things go wrong: Admit nothing, do nothing.
- It looks like DEFRA didn't know anything about writing regulations for cats, so imagined that a Sheep Farm Hotel would be close enough.
- It looks like DEFRA also thought that a Michelin star rating would let the public know if we provide wi-fi in pens or improve animal welfare.
But there was so much more to learn about bureaucracies and how they are irresponsible and dysfunctional at every level.
- We’ve had to learn that when things go wrong, no one’s responsible.
- We’ve had to learn that nothing is DEFRA’s fault.
- We’ve had to learn that local authorities took pubic money to interpret the regulations and then imposed inexplicit sanctions in whatever way they chose.
- And we’ve had to learn that local authorities blame the regulations for closing down businesses because DEFRA forgot to specify anything in the regulations that considered decades of experience or the quality of animal welfare.
We’ve had to learn that while some local authorities are responsive and relatively co-operative, many represent a sub-standard layer of wannabe dictators.
- Bureaucrats are people who refuse to recognise or fix their mistakes.
- Refuse to reform their procedures when they go wrong and refuse to adjust their working environment for efficiency.
- This level of bureaucrat dedicates more time to hiding their disorganisation, waste and corruption and spends more time whining about funding and being overworked than doing their jobs or providing services.
We learned that DEFRA refused to open lines of communications with local authorities and refused to talk with our representatives until they were embarrassed by the questions raised in Parliament and support from Sir Lindsay Hoyle.
- We learned that not a single local authority has the same hierarchy or procedures.
- We learned that Bureaucrats do not think outside the box and will not or do anything until they are told to.
- We leaned that whenever mistakes were made local authorities all shared the same opinion that DEFRA had given them the power to impose a farcical and imaginary set of regulations on our industry and close us down if we couldn't comply.
- Our representatives have had to engage with people who have no recognisable work ethic or social morality who were paid to do a job that required integrity, respect and honesty who couldn’t even take responsibility for their own decisions.
Overall, our representatives have learned that while individual licensing officers failed to question, understand or apply DEFRA’s regulations correctly or consistently, in private they blame DEFRA - But in public these disgraceful bureaucrats blame individual businesses for not complying with regulations that they knew should never have been written in the first place.