How Swindon's council licenses dog boarders
Two councils license Swindon's 29 dog boarding, day-care and home-boarding businesses: Swindon Borough Council, covering Swindon town itself along with Wroughton and Highworth despite their SN4 and SN6 postcodes, and Wiltshire Council, covering the villages around Royal Wootton Bassett, Marlborough and the rural fringe of Highworth. In England, boarding kennels, home boarding and day care are all licensed activities under the same 2018 regulations, whichever council issues the licence.
Swindon Borough Council: the best-fielded register on this site
Swindon Borough Council publishes its own browsable directory, giving a licence number, a star rating out of five where one has been awarded, and how many dogs or animals the licence covers — but never a street address or expiry date for a home boarder, almost certainly because a home boarder's premises is a private house. Of the 22 businesses licensed here, a star rating was read directly off the register for 14: nine hold five stars and five hold four stars. One of those, Badbury Pet Adventures, no longer shows a licence panel at all because its recorded licence has since expired (more below), so 13 currently display a star rating. The other eight are licensed but the register shows no star rating for that particular listing, which is not the same as a poor rating; it simply means none has been recorded on the page checked.
Wiltshire Council: postcode and licence type only
The seven businesses around Royal Wootton Bassett, Marlborough and Highworth licensed by Wiltshire Council were checked through animal-licensing.uk, a third-party mirror of the council's own register. That mirror gives a postcode and a licence type but no star rating, licence number or expiry date on its authority-wide table, so none of these seven — including Braydon Dogs, Flaxlands Kennels & Cattery and Dukesmead Boarding Kennels & Cattery — carries a star figure on this page, whatever a business's own marketing might claim.
Self-reported stars, and why they are not always shown
Dukesmead Boarding Kennels & Cattery is described as five-star rated on some third-party listings, and Highworth Pet Care describes itself as five stars on its own site, but neither figure could be matched to a reading taken directly from a council register, so no star rating is shown for either. It's A Dogs Life is the opposite case: its own Facebook page claimed a 5-star licence, and that figure was then checked directly against Swindon Borough Council's own register page and confirmed, so it is shown here.
A licence that has since lapsed
A licence recorded during research can lapse before you call. Badbury Pet Adventures's home-boarding licence was recorded with a 4-star rating and an expiry date of July 2026, which has now passed, so no licence panel is shown on its listing; ask to see a current licence before booking rather than relying on a figure found in research. Betts Pets describes itself as council-licensed but could not be matched to a specific register entry on either council, so it carries no licence details here either.
What a star rating means, and what to check yourself
Where a star rating is shown, it is the council's own inspection score tied to how the licence is reinspected, worth reading the way you would a food hygiene rating rather than a customer review. You can look up a Swindon Borough Council business directly on the council's own directory, or a Wiltshire-licensed business on the animal-licensing.uk mirror, to confirm what is shown here yourself.