How Torquay's three councils license 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 Torquay's twenty-eight listed businesses sit under three different councils depending on their address: Torbay Council (Torquay town centre, Paignton and Brixham, 21 businesses), Teignbridge District Council (Newton Abbot and Teignmouth & Dawlish, four businesses) and South Hams District Council (Kingsbridge & Salcombe and Dartmouth, three businesses). Each of the three offers a genuinely different level of checking.
Torbay Council: a live register that prints no stars
Torbay Council's own page, torbay.gov.uk, is itself the register rather than a separate database or PDF, and it lists all twenty-one Torquay, Paignton and Brixham businesses on this page by name, address and phone. It shows no licence numbers and no star ratings at all for any business, so none of the Torbay-licensed listings here carries a star rating, whatever a business's own marketing might say elsewhere; a self-reported figure is mentioned only as the business's own claim, never as an independently confirmed rating.
Teignbridge District Council: a mirror, not the council's own page
Teignbridge's own public-register tool does not cover animal licensing at all. A third-party mirror of its register, animal-licensing.uk, substitutes, and shows no star ratings either. Two of the four Teignbridge-area businesses, Monty's Friends and Wickham Walkies, are confirmed on that mirror with a licence number; Cary Boarding Kennels and Castleford Pet Centre quote their own licence number on their own site, but this could not be matched against the mirror, so ask to see the certificate directly.
South Hams District Council: no register could be read at all
This is the plainest gap of the three: South Hams's own online register runs as a web application that returned no readable data on any attempt made for this site, and its previous PDF fallback no longer works either. All three South Hams-area businesses — The Dog Lodge, Blackdown Rings Kennels & Cattery and Dartmouth Canine Care — are shown here on their own stated licence only, not confirmed against any council source. If a South Hams-area licence matters to your decision, ringing the council directly is the only way to check it independently right now.
What a licence covers regardless of which council issued it
Whichever council is involved, every licensed business in Torquay 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 read a star score or confirm a number independently.
Checking it yourself
Torbay's register is public at torbay.gov.uk; ask a Teignbridge or South Hams business directly for its licence number, and call the relevant council's own licensing team if you want independent confirmation of it.