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UK Cattery Licensing Coverage

Which local authorities publish their animal activity licensing registers for cat boarding, and the completeness of each register.

Data building. We are progressively adding council coverage. This page will show a council-by-council breakdown as each register is ingested. Check back for updates.

About animal activity licensing

Under The Animal Welfare (Licensing of Activities Involving Animals) (England) Regulations 2018, local authorities are required to licence premises that provide boarding for cats. Schedule 3 requires licence holders to be identifiable to the public — in practice this means the register should be publicly searchable.

Around 340 local authorities in England licence cat boarding. Publication practices vary significantly — some publish structured CSV data, others publish PDFs, and a minority respond only to FOI requests. Our ingestion pipeline handles all three formats.

Coverage tiers

Tier A — structured data

Machine-readable CSV or JSON. Highest coverage quality. Updated on our standard crawl cycle.

Tier B — PDF / web table

Requires parsing. Good coverage but may miss edge cases. Updated on our crawl cycle.

Tier C — FOI only

No public digital register. Requires Freedom of Information request. Updated quarterly.

Council-by-council breakdown

Full council coverage table coming as ingestion expands. If you are a journalist or researcher needing current coverage data, contact data@comparecatteryprices.co.uk.