Mr. Gerry Neary:

The problem with lay incorporates is a problem of governance in that if there is a corporate body in which there are veterinaries only - the owners - they are all answerable to and ethically bound by the Veterinary Council. In the legal advice we got, one of the star issues that was pointed out to us was that the Veterinary Council issued an edict on ownership being allowed to anybody without putting any structures in place at least whereby lay people could be answerable to somebody for how they would run a veterinary practice. The fundamental problem is that lay corporates would have no governance whatsoever. They would have no disciplinary procedures that are both ethically and legally placed on veterinaries. This is the fundamental problem we would see between lay incorporation and veterinarian incorporation.