How York and Tadcaster license dog boarders
York's 14 listed dog boarders, day cares and kennels sit across two licensing authorities with very different registers: City of York Council, covering the city itself, and North Yorkshire Council, covering the Tadcaster area and a couple of kennels just outside the city boundary.
City of York Council: a live, detailed register
City of York Council publishes its own animal activities licence register as a plain web page, giving a licence number, star rating and expiry date for every entry, organised by licensable activity. Eight of the 14 businesses on this page fall under its area, and five are confirmed directly against the register: Rose Cottage Farm Kennels & Cattery at 3 stars, and Golden Paws of York, Stud Farm Country Club for Dogs, YORPAWS and Waggy Tails / Heather's Lavender Dog Hotel all currently at 5 stars. The other three City of York-area businesses — Good Boy Pet Services, Petpals York and Foss Bank Kennels — do not appear on the register under a confirmed licence, so no council licence block is shown for any of the three; Good Boy Pet Services states on its own site that its licence was approved following an inspection.
North Yorkshire Council: offline throughout this research
North Yorkshire Council's register was checked more than once during this research and showed only a message that its data was being refreshed; it never came back up. As a result, none of the six businesses it licenses — Rose Farm Boarding Kennels, White Daisy Home Boarding & Pet Sitting, Paws in the Countryside, Peach's Pals, Dunholme Grange Boarding Kennels & Cattery and Ackerley Park Kennels & Cattery — could be checked against an official register. Paws in the Countryside and Peach's Pals each state a licence detail on their own site (a star rating and a licence number respectively), but neither claim could be confirmed independently, so no council licence block is shown for either. Treat a self-stated licence claim from a Tadcaster-area business as a starting point for a question, not as a checked fact, at least until the register is working again.
What a star rating means, and doesn't
Where shown, a council licence rating is the council's own inspection score, tied to how often the licence is reinspected, and it is not a customer review; treat it the way you would a food hygiene rating rather than a Google star. It is shown here only when read directly from a council's own register.
What to do if you're in the Tadcaster area
Since North Yorkshire Council's register cannot currently be checked, the more direct route for a Tadcaster-area business is to ask for its licence number and call the council's licensing team to confirm it, rather than relying on a claim made on a business's own website, which this directory cannot verify either while the register is down.