How Leicester's councils license dog boarders
Leicester's thirty listed businesses sit under six different licensing authorities, because the areas on this page cross several council boundaries: Leicester City Council (3 businesses), Oadby and Wigston Borough Council (8), Blaby District Council (5), Charnwood Borough Council (7), Harborough District Council (6) and Kettering Borough Council (1). In England, boarding kennels, home boarding and day care are all licensed activities under the Animal Welfare (Licensing of Activities Involving Animals) (England) Regulations 2018, whichever council issues the licence.
Leicester City Council
Leicester City Council runs a live open-data register, covering the three leicester-centre businesses on this page: Happy Paws Leicester, Riverside Boarding Kennels and Kokos Trails Dog Walking. It gives a licence number, activity and star rating, but no address field, so a business's area on this site comes from another source, not the register itself. Kokos Trails Dog Walking's licence had passed its expiry date when checked, so no star rating is shown for it here; ask about renewal directly. You can check the register yourself on the council's own animal licensing page.
Oadby and Wigston Borough Council
Oadby and Wigston publishes a PDF register that is unusually complete: name, full address, proprietor, star rating and expiry all in one table, covering the eight Oadby and Wigston businesses here. All eight currently carry a star rating, ranging from 2 stars (Kelli's Pet Services) to 5. The register itself is the source for these figures.
Blaby, Charnwood and Harborough district councils
Blaby District Council and Charnwood Borough Council are both read through the same third-party mirror, animal-licensing.uk, rather than the council's own page directly; neither mirror carries a star rating or a phone number, so no star figure is shown for any of Blaby's five or Charnwood's seven businesses on this site. Harborough District Council publishes its own PDF list of licences with a star rating and proprietor name but no address; six businesses here sit under Harborough, and three of them — The Dog Club Lubenham, K9 Home Boarding and Yappy Tails Dog Services — had a licence recorded on that list, though two of the three had passed their expiry date when checked, so no star or expiry is shown for those on this site. You can check Blaby and Charnwood businesses via Blaby's mirror page and Charnwood's mirror page, and Harborough's businesses via the council's own PDF.
Kettering Borough Council: one business, not independently checked
Wooden House Kennels, in Braybrooke, states on its own site that it is licensed by Kettering Borough Council rather than Harborough District Council, even though its postcode places it in this page's Market Harborough area. No Kettering register was checked for this research, so that licence claim could not be independently confirmed; ask to see the certificate directly if it matters to your decision.
What's not matched or not shown
Minezara Home Boarding Services, TailTroopers and Doggy Day Care Leicester could not be matched to any of these registers in this round of research, and Porter's Paw Patrol states a Harborough licence number on its own site that this research could not confirm against the council's list. None of this means a business is unlicensed — a licence can be recorded under a different trading name, or simply not yet found — but it does mean no licence details are shown for these four here. Ask each directly to see its current certificate.
What a licence covers, whichever council issued it
Every licensed business 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, whichever of the six councils and whichever register format applies. A council can revoke or refuse to renew a licence if a business falls below standard, so a current licence is itself a meaningful check even where this page cannot show a star figure.