How Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft's councils license dog boarders

The thirteen dog boarders, day cares and kennels listed across Great Yarmouth & Gorleston, Lowestoft and Beccles & Bungay are licensed by two councils, and the two publish their registers in very different ways.

Great Yarmouth Borough Council

Four confirmed businesses in the Great Yarmouth & Gorleston area — Andrews Holiday Inn for Dogs and Cats, Bondi Petcare, The Doghouse and PetStay Norfolk — are licensed by Great Yarmouth Borough Council. The council does not publish its own online register; its licences were read here through the animal-licensing.uk mirror, a third-party site, not the council's own published document. That mirror gives a licence number and expiry date for each operator but no star rating, so none is shown here for any of the four, whatever a business might say about itself elsewhere.

East Suffolk Council

Six confirmed businesses across Lowestoft and Beccles & Bungay are licensed by East Suffolk Council, which publishes its own PDF registers directly, dated as at 1 September 2026, and gives a star rating to every entry: Wiggley Walkers Lowestoft, Cases and Canines and We Love Pets East Coast each hold 4 stars, Paws of Pakefield 5 stars, Beccles Cosy Home Dog Boarding 4 stars, and Noosabay Kennels & Cattery and Pineview Farm Kennels each 5 stars. Each figure is shown here exactly as the register gives it, with no comparison implied between a 4-star and a 5-star licence: both are current, licensed businesses, and the figure reflects the council's own inspection score, not a customer opinion. Two further Lowestoft-area businesses, East Point Paws and We Love Pets Beccles, could not be matched to East Suffolk's published registers when this page was checked, so no star or licence panel is shown for either.

What the star rating means

Where it is shown, a council licence star rating is the result of a risk-based inspection under the Animal Welfare (Licensing of Activities Involving Animals) (England) Regulations 2018, tied to how long the licence runs: a 1-star licence typically runs a year, a 5-star licence up to three. It is a government inspection score, never a customer review, and this site never mixes the two or uses the same icon for both.

What this means for you

A star rating here says more about which register a council publishes than about how well a business is run: Great Yarmouth Borough Council's own choice not to publish a rated register directly is why none of its four confirmed businesses carries a star, not any finding about their standard of care. Ask any business, whichever council licenses it, to show you its current certificate before booking.