How Macclesfield's dog boarders are licensed: two different councils
Dog boarding, home boarding and day care are licensed activities under the Animal Welfare (Licensing of Activities Involving Animals) (England) Regulations 2018, and this page's four areas split across two different councils. Cheshire East Council licenses thirteen of the seventeen businesses listed — everything in Macclesfield, Wilmslow & Alderley Edge and Congleton, plus the Poynton side of Poynton & Bramhall. Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council licenses the other four, all on the Bramhall side of Poynton & Bramhall: Birch Hall Boarding Kennels & Cattery, Woof Squad, Barking Mad Stockport and Penny's Pooches.
Cheshire East's register
Cheshire East publishes its register through the third-party platform animal-licensing.uk rather than its own site, covering all 212 operators it licenses countywide, not just the four towns covered here. Cheshire East Council's licences on this page were read from the animal-licensing.uk mirror rather than a register the council publishes itself, so no star rating is shown for any of them: the block gives the licence number and expiry only. Windyway Kennels & Cattery's own site quotes a Cheshire East licence number, but this could not be independently matched to the register in this check, so no licence details are shown on its listing.
A licence that has since lapsed
Country Kennels comes with a caveat: the register's own expiry date for that licence, January 2026, has already passed, so its listing carries no live licence block while that remains unconfirmed. This is not treated as evidence the business has stopped trading — a council register can simply lag behind a renewal — but ask Country Kennels directly whether its licence has been renewed, and ask to see the current certificate.
Stockport's register
Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council runs its own planning and licensing portal rather than using animal-licensing.uk, and its register gives a licence number and expiry date for each holder but, unlike Cheshire East, no star rating field at all. So Birch Hall Boarding Kennels & Cattery, Woof Squad, Barking Mad Stockport and Penny's Pooches are each shown here with a confirmed licence but no star, which is a genuine difference between the two councils' formats rather than a gap in what this directory could find.
Reading a star rating
A star rating shown here is a council licence rating from a risk-based inspection, not a customer review, so treat it the way you would a food hygiene rating rather than a Google star. Where a business's own website quotes a different figure than the council's current register, the register is treated as the authoritative figure throughout this page. None of the businesses here sit in Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland, so a rating exists in principle for every Cheshire East licence; Stockport's format simply does not publish one for any business it licenses, whichever side of the county line it sits on.