DEFRA would love us to believe that they didn’t make the entire regulatory framework up out of thin air.
There was no policy or justification behind the new regulations because there was no data suggesting that animal cruelty was so prevalent in our sector that private businesses had to be taken under government control ... and the only reaction from the DEFRA kids is “Because I Said So!”
DEFRA need to be held to account and they need to explain how they put our regulations together, because if DEFRA were rated by the public they’d be at 100% incompetence and no due diligence with a butter icing topping of zero integrity, credibility or transparency.
- If the regulations were defensible the scientific support, drafts, working documents and initial briefs would be offered up for scrutiny.
- Our regulations appear to be made up of arbitrary requirements and numbers and it doesn’t look like there was any consideration of consequences, zero duty of care and no due diligence exercised.
- Where are the impact assessments or a list of potential consequences?
- How was each dual standard found in all the regulations assessed, discussed and hammered out?
- We need DEFRA to reveal when, why and on what basis each and every regulation came into existence.
- DEFRA need to justify, not the time-wasting and stupid ideas, but how thier obsession with the unworkable rating system lead tem to write dual standards of care for each regulation and how two standards of care was going to improve animal welfare!
- DEFRA need to address why it appears that the insanely complex rating system couldn’t be applied consistently by local authorities and conveys nothing to anyone became the primary goal.
- If all of DEFRA’s protocols were followed and if every regulation was thoroughly vetted before inclusion, DEFRA still have to explain how they failed to deliver on any objective and how anything so ridiculous and unworkable was signed off by anyone.
If DEFRA had followed any normal industrial procedures, our sector would have had years of prior warnings and consultations, years to plan the expenditure to meet the costs of the new regulations and further years further to implement them.
- It looks to me like these regulations were put together by inexperienced post graduate students who majored in the art history of the couterfeit pharmaceutical packaging industry or wrote their thesis on the impact of discarded toe-nail clippings on giant anteaters because Daddy used to play golf with the governor of Georgetown.
- Other people have described the regulations as a collection of random ideas passed around during the Christmas party where anyone invited could type random rule couplets into a Word document.
- Earlier this year I wrote a whole post on the ludicrous nature of the regulations "Regulation by Imagination."
- With all the joke regulations included, I’m surprised that we aren’t having to keep a permantent record of how many whiskers every cat arrives with for the inspections.
- And I’m surprised that we weren’t ordered to repurpose the now defunct ISO rooms to add a carrier maintenance department to make sure the cats are secure on their way home.
On day one, DEFRA could have taken responsibility and revoked the legislation.
But several years later and with a trail of carnage in their wake, DEFRA are standing by every line of legislation and DEFRA’s only defence is "Because I said so".