How Stevenage's 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 Stevenage's page spans three separate licensing authorities: Stevenage Borough Council, North Hertfordshire District Council and Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council. Only one of the three could be read directly this round as a live council register with a star rating.
Stevenage Borough Council: no public register
Stevenage Borough Council does not run an animal-licensing register on its own website; its "Licensing Public Registers" page covers the Licensing Act, the Gambling Act and HMOs, and its animal-licensing page carries only application forms, no register or list. What is shown here for the council's three licensed businesses — Little Dave and Charlie, TopDog and We Love Pets Stevenage — is read from a third-party mirror of the council's list rather than the council's own page, and because it is a mirror, no star rating is shown for any of the three.
North Hertfordshire District Council's own PDF register
North Hertfordshire District Council publishes its own PDF register directly, split into category tables for home boarding, day creche, cat boarding, dog kennels and others, and it does give a star rating for each entry, though no address, licence number or expiry date at all. Four of Stevenage's businesses are licensed here: Country Boarding Kennels (5 stars, listed on the register under the name Every Dog Club Baldock Ltd, which it is rebranding to), Sentabarcs (4 stars), K9 Interaction (5 stars) and We Love Pets Hitchin (4 stars).
Two businesses stating a licence the register could not confirm
Happy Waggy Tails and Wagalot Dogs both state on their own sites that they hold a North Hertfordshire home-boarding licence, in Wagalot Dogs' case at what its site describes as the council's highest star band. Because North Herts' register carries no licence number or address to check a name against, and lists dozens of similarly small trading names, neither claim could be matched to a specific register entry this round, so no licence panel is shown for either business here. Ask to see a current licence certificate directly if this matters to your decision.
Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council: no listed business yet
Welwyn & Welwyn Garden City sits under a third authority, Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council, whose own site also carries no animal-licensing register the way North Herts does. No business in that area could be confirmed with a working phone number this round, so none is listed for it yet; this is a gap in what could be confirmed, not a sign that nothing operates there.
What to check yourself
For the three Stevenage Borough Council businesses and the two unconfirmed North Herts claims, the most direct check is to ask for a licence number and contact the relevant council's licensing team directly rather than relying on a claim made on a business's own page. For the four businesses confirmed against North Herts' own register, the star rating shown here is a council licence rating, not a customer review, and reflects a risk-based inspection rather than anything this directory measured itself.