How Preston's council licenses 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 in Preston that licence can come from five different councils depending on where a business sits: Preston City Council, South Ribble Borough Council, Chorley Council, Fylde Borough Council or Wyre Council. This is the most fragmented licensing picture on this site: only one of the five publishes a register this directory could check.
Preston City Council: the only checkable register
Preston City Council publishes its licensing decisions as a separate page for each year rather than one live, searchable register — "Animal Activity Licences 2024," "...2025," and so on. Eight businesses on this page carry a licence confirmed against one of these year pages: Mill House, Frankies Doggy Daycare, Cow Hill Kennels, Landorn Kennels, We Love Pets Lytham, Barton Boarding Kennels, Willows Country Friends and Joanna's Animal Care. Because each year's page lists licences issued or renewed that year rather than every currently valid one, a business's true current status can mean checking more than one year's page, and no 2026 page has been published yet.
Why you won't see a star score
England's licensing regulations allow for a 1-to-5 star inspection score, but Preston City Council's own year pages, as read for this site, do not show one for any of the eight confirmed businesses above. That is a limit of the source this directory could read, not a claim that none of them holds a star rating at all, and it is a different thing entirely from a customer review.
The four councils with no usable register
South Ribble Borough Council (covering Penwortham & Lostock Hall and Bamber Bridge & Leyland), Chorley Council (covering Chorley) and Wyre Council (covering part of Garstang) publish no public register at all: only an application-form or fees page could be found for each. Fylde Borough Council's own register, covering the Kirkham & Wesham area, exists but returned a technical error every time this directory tried to read it. Together these four councils cover six of the sixteen businesses on this page — Danielle's Home Boarding, Auntie's Doggie Day Care (Bamber Bridge), Digs for Dogs - Leyland, High Heyes Farm, Fur Cottage Kennels and Badgerswood Boarding Kennels. Their licence, where claimed, is shown here as stated by the business itself, not confirmed against a register.
Two more without a matched entry
Auntie's Doggie Day Care (Preston) and We Love Pets Preston sit within the area Preston City Council covers, but neither could be matched to a specific entry on the council's year pages within the research done for this site, so their licence position is also shown as stated by the business rather than confirmed. That leaves eight of the sixteen businesses on this page confirmed directly against a council register, and eight shown on the business's own word.
What to check yourself
For any business confirmed above, you can look up the relevant year's page on preston.gov.uk to see the licence for yourself. For a business under one of the other four councils, the most direct route is to ask for its licence number and call the council's own licensing team, rather than relying on a claim made on a business's own website, which this directory cannot independently verify either.
What a licence covers regardless of which council issued it
Whichever council is involved, every licensed business in Preston has been assessed against the same 2018 regulations covering space, exercise, feeding, record-keeping and how many dogs may be kept at once, and a 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 confirm one directly or read a star score.