How Bedford's councils license dog boarders
Dog boarding, home boarding and day care are licensed activities under the Animal Welfare (Licensing of Activities Involving Animals) (England) Regulations 2018, and Bedford's page spans three separate licensing authorities: Bedford Borough Council, Central Bedfordshire Council and Huntingdonshire District Council. All three run their own online systems, but none of the three could be read directly for this page.
Why none of the three councils' own registers could be used
Bedford Borough Council's and Central Bedfordshire Council's own register pages block an automated check outright. Huntingdonshire District Council does not publish a usable register page of its own either. In place of all three, this page uses a third-party mirror, animal-licensing.uk, which republishes each council's licence decisions as a plain table.
What the mirror shows, and what it does not
The mirror gives licence type, and for Bedford Borough Council and Huntingdonshire District Council a licence number and address; Central Bedfordshire's entries carry neither an address nor a licence number on the mirror, only the trading name and licence type. None of the three councils' entries on the mirror carry a star rating, because a mirror of a council's decisions is not the council's own register — so no star rating is shown anywhere on this page, even where a business quotes one about itself elsewhere.
What that means for the nine businesses here
Five are licensed by Bedford Borough Council: Chihuahua Country Club & Small Dogs Boarding, Fetch Club, Howlies Doggy Daycare, RoLo Home From Home Dog Boarding and The K9 Klub. One, Woofstop, is licensed by Central Bedfordshire Council. Three — Alconbury Hill Kennels & Cattery, Hayley's Active Paws & Stays and PetStay Cambridge, Huntingdon & Royston — are licensed by Huntingdonshire District Council. All nine were matched to a mirror entry, so a licence is confirmed for every business on this page, even though no star figure is shown for any of them.
A naming note worth knowing
Two of the nine businesses trade under a different name to the one their licence is recorded against: Huntingdonshire's mirror lists Hayley's Active Paws & Stays under an earlier trading name, Bushells Active Paws and Stays, at the same address and licence number, and The K9 Klub's own site gives a slightly different postcode to the one on the mirror for the same Harrowden Lane address. Neither is a sign of a problem with the licence itself, just of a register that has not caught up with a rebrand or a postcode correction.
What to check yourself
Because none of the three councils' own registers could be read directly, the most direct check is to ask a business for its licence number and, if you want it confirmed independently, to contact the relevant council's licensing team rather than relying on a claim made on a business's own website, which this directory cannot verify either.
What a licence covers regardless of how hard it is to check
Whichever of the three councils issued it, every licensed boarder on this page has been assessed against the same 2018 regulations covering space, exercise, feeding, record-keeping and how many dogs may be kept at once, and the council can revoke or refuse to renew a licence if a business falls below standard. A current licence is a meaningful check on its own, even where no star score is available to read.