How North Yorkshire Council licenses dog boarders in Harrogate
Dog boarding, home boarding and day care are licensed activities under the Animal Welfare (Licensing of Activities Involving Animals) (England) Regulations 2018, and across the whole of this page — Harrogate, Ripon, Malton, Pickering, Thirsk, Northallerton, Easingwold and Boroughbridge — that licence comes from a single authority, North Yorkshire Council, the unitary council that replaced Harrogate Borough, Hambleton, Ryedale, Selby, Craven, Scarborough and Richmondshire district and borough councils on 1 April 2023.
Why the council's own page doesn't work
North Yorkshire Council's own website publishes application guidance for an animal welfare licence, but no searchable register and no downloadable list of who currently holds one. The pre-2023 Harrogate Borough Council public-register tool now redirects automatically to that same generic guidance page, confirming the old district-level register has been retired rather than simply moved somewhere else on the site.
The source this directory actually used
In place of a council-run register, this page is checked against animal-licensing.uk, a county-wide public list run independently of North Yorkshire Council, covering every type of animal-related licence the council issues, not dog boarding alone. Filtered down to the postcode districts covered by Harrogate's five areas, that list held 159 licensed premises of all kinds, of which 89 were dog boarding, dog home boarding or dog day care. Because this is a third-party mirror rather than the council's own register, and because North Yorkshire Council has not adopted it as an official source, no star rating from it is shown anywhere on this page, even though the mirror's own list view does carry one for each entry.
What that means for the licence number
The mirror's list view gives a name, address, licence type and star rating for each entry, but not a licence number or expiry date; those appear only on each operator's individual page, and fetching all 89 individually was outside what this round of research could check. Six of the twenty-four businesses published here happen to state their own licence number on their own website, and those are shown: Sutton Grange Boarding Kennels (LN/199301346), Brackenfarg Kennels (BRD/148541/W), Moor View Kennels & Cattery (C24/01492/ANBRDM), Romanby Kennels (B21/13/Y2), Low Shires Boarding Kennels (ANBRD-126375-E) and The Easingwold Waggy Dog Walker (ANBRD-126481-E). The other eighteen show a licence type only.
What to check yourself
Because North Yorkshire Council itself publishes no register you can read online, the most direct check is to ask a business for its licence number and, if you want it confirmed independently, to contact the council's own licensing team rather than relying on a claim made on a business's own website, which this directory cannot verify either. Asking to see the certificate itself, in person or by photo, is worth more here than in a town with a working council register.
What a licence covers regardless of how hard it is to check
Whichever of the seven former districts a business's licence was first issued under, every licensed boarder, home boarder and day care across 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 North Yorkshire 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 this directory could not read a star score or a licence number directly from the council.