Pet boarding establishments and professional dog walkers are now having to apply for licences, and pay fees for them, after the Environment & Infrastructure Committee pursued the idea over the past 18 months, and introduced the licences by regulation.
Deputy Sloan yesterday tried to encourage his colleagues to annul the regulation, but failed by 14 votes to 19.
‘This is not a policy choice. It’s a pattern of behaviour that should concern every member,’ he said.
‘It’s a question of proportionality, and it’s a question of process.’
Deputy Sloan said that the licensing regime for dog businesses was unnecessary in a small community where reputation was paramount and could make or break a business without licensing.
‘Yet the response is licensing, inspection, compliance requirements, administrative oversight, cost burden – this is disproportionate.
‘This is not targeted regulation responding to a clearly evidenced problem. It is not a measured intervention. It is administrative expansion, the extension of regulatory machinery into areas where the case has not been convincingly made.
‘We should be honest about what we are seeing here. This is how regulatory creep happens. This is how you end up with a long arm of the bureaucrat reaching further and further into ordinary life.’
He said that the committee had provided no evidence to justify the intervention.
‘What I’ve seen instead is a regulatory solution in search of a problem, and that is always a dangerous place to end up, because at this point, we are no longer regulated for need. We are regulated for control.
‘Proportionality matters, because regulation is not neutral.
‘It shapes behaviour, it creates incentives, and over time, it reshapes the character of our economy.
‘In a small island economy, that matters even more, because these are not large businesses.
‘These are individuals, small operators providing local, practical services.
‘We should be encouraging that, not making it harder, because once you move from a system of trust to a system of permission, you fundamentally change the relationship between the individual and the state, and that shift should only occur when it is clearly necessary.’
Among Deputy Sloan’s supporters were four of the five members of the Economic Development Committee, including president Sasha Kazantseva-Miller.
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