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Log in See all News The fightback against Britain’s corporate vets has begun With costs continuing to spiral, angry pet owners and independent practices have had enough of the big companies dominating the industry 481 Gift this article free Sally Williams 24 August 2025 12:00pm BST Caroline* and Julian* had been married for 10 years before the arrival of Amy, a miniature dachshund. They had different views about pets. She had grown up surrounded by dogs and really missed having one around the house. He was not a dog person. They had a happy marriage, a lovely house in south London, good jobs (he worked in finance, she for charities). “But we couldn’t have children and so decided having a dog would make our life more complete,” Caroline explains. Just before the first lockdown of March 2020, they went to a miniature dachshund breeder in Colchester. A tiny bundle of fur with brown eyes looked up at her husband, says Caroline, and in that instant something clicked. “He just fell in love with her. We knew we had to have her.” From that moment on, Amy was a member of the family. But she didn’t come cheap. There were routine health checks, a monthly parasite treatment, and also cream for mildly flaky skin around her neck and body. Costs really spiralled when Amy started to hop during a holiday in Cornwall when she was six months old. The local vet said she had a “wobbly knee” and suspected a luxating patella (a kneecap that slips out of place; common in small dogs). Back in London, Caroline’s vet thought it could be hip dysplasia where the hip joint doesn’t develop properly. Over the next six months, Amy had two X-rays under sedation, blood tests, painkilling medication, and multiple trips to a specialist clinic in Guildford, where she had physiotherapy and hydrotherapy at a cost of £75 a session. Eventually, Amy was seen by a leading small-animal specialist at a referral clinic in Kent. He was not able to identify a clear reason for her hopping. Amy, the expert concluded, “should return to a normal life”. Caroline was lucky she had insurance. But it still fell short of covering the total bill of £5,000. “I don’t know anything about veterinary care, so I just did whatever the vets told us to do,” says Caroline. “We feel they did too much. Amy had treatment she didn’t really need. But of course we agreed to the treatment because we love her and we wanted her to be better.” Helplessness, panic, a sinking feeling in the stomach – the worry that comes when a pet is in pain can be awful. But so is the cost of treatment. Nationally, pet owners spend around £4bn a year on veterinary services. And yet there is little consensus on prices. A low risk, high reward opportunity This is one of the concerns being investigated by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the UK competition watchdog, which, after a national outcry about spiralling vet costs, is next month set to announce the provisional decisions from its market investigation into veterinary services for household pets. This was set up in response to the takeover of veterinary practices by large corporate groups. “Pet owners may not be getting a good deal or receiving the information they need to make good choices,” it stated at the launch of the market review in September 2023. The CMA has addressed many unfair, monopolistic practices in its 10-year history, such as funeral companies and airport services. It currently has 63 “live cases/ investigations”, including Ticketmaster (triggered by the dynamic pricing for tickets for the Oasis Live ’25 Tour) and Google, the US technology giant, for its dominance in the online search market. But the investigation into vets and pets was exceptionally wide-ranging. It included hands-on site visits, teach-ins and round-table discussions with professionals, businesses and the public at large. This is not unusual. The idea is to share knowledge. What has been extraordinary is the unprecedented response. More than 56,000 people (45,000 pet owners and 11,000 veterinary professionals) replied to the CMA’s online questionnaire. To get 56,000 people to do anything is impressive. To get 56,000 people to respond to a consultation by the CMA is unheard of. Our devotion to pets is big business. Several factors have come into play. More people are living alone – 8.4 million people, or 30 per cent of all households, in 2023, according to the Office for National Statistics – and fewer people are having babies. Both have combined to deepen our relationship with pets. There were, it transpires, more Google searches for “is my dog happy” than “is my kid happy” according to a report called Pets are the New Kids from Google in 2022. Of course, it’s not entirely clear if that’s because human children can talk, whereas barks can be confusing. But the sentiment is revealing. Owners are concerned about their dogs’ wellbeing. What’s more, they are willing to go into debt to cover their pets’ medical bills. Big money investors noticed the “humanisation” of pets, advances in veterinary care and the scale of ownership – there was a spike during lockdown when 3.2 million households acquired a pet with more than half of UK households now owning an animal – and saw an enticing formula. The field was viewed as low-risk/high-reward, according to a report issued by Capstone Partners in 2022. The structure of UK veterinary services created an opportunity. In 1999, the law was changed to allow non-vets to own veterinary practices. What’s more, the UK has a relaxed regulatory environment. Veterinary surgeons are regulated by the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons. But veterinary practices are not. The market was wide open. In 2013, only about 10 per cent of vet practices belonged to large groups. Today, almost 60 per cent are owned by the “Big Six”: IVC Evidensia, CVS, Medivet, Pets at Home, Linnaeus and VetPartners. Of these, IVC, Medivet and VetPartners are owned or backed by private equity firms – investment funds that purchase companies with the aim of delivering profits to their shareholders. Nestlé (of Cheerios and Shredded Wheat fame) is one of the groups behind the largest owner of veterinary services in the UK, IVC Evidensia, which operates more than 1,000 veterinary practices (out of a total of 5,331 in the UK). It also owns 60-plus emergency out-of-hours hospitals, through Vets Now. Not to mention PawSquad, an online telehealth service, pet funeral and cremation businesses and Pet Drugs Online – an online pharmacy selling pet medication. EQT, the world’s third-largest private equity firm, controls IVC Evidensia which has an estimated annual revenue of over £221m. Nestlé acquired a stake in IVC in 2021. Medivet owns more than 400 veterinary centres across the UK, including the Skeldale Veterinary Centre in Thirsk, North Yorkshire, the practice made famous by the semi-biographical books of James Herriot (real name Alf Wight) in the 1970s. It is controlled by the private equity firm CVC Capital Partners. As big businesses bought up veterinary clinics, prices began to rise – a lot. Vet bills soared by more 60 per cent between 2015 and 2023, higher than the rate of inflation, which was around 35 per cent. The stakes are high in veterinary medicine. More pets are being put down due to rising vet bills, according to a BBC report. “The sad thing is people are frightened to go to the vets because of the cost,” says Melanie Weatherall, owner and director of Oxford Cat Clinic, a cat-only clinic in Oxford. “We had a cat yesterday that had died on the way to the clinic. The lady was hysterical. She was beating herself up because she felt she should have got the cat to us sooner. There are things we could have done, but it was too late.” Lack of transparency is another complaint. Six years ago, Beverley Cuddy, editor of Dogs Today magazine, went to an emergency out-of-hours vet to have Oscar, her beloved bearded collie, put down. He was 16, had a growing list of things wrong and had been hit by a particularly bad bout of pancreatitis. “I could tell he was in terrible pain,” she says. “I wanted the nearest vet who could put him out of his misery in the most gentle way possible.” She arrived at the vets with her family who had come to say goodbye. But to Cuddy, the clinic felt transactional. “They wouldn’t even look at the dog until they’d swiped a credit card. Then they started upselling me to a crematorium. I wasn’t ready for that. But they wanted to put it on the credit card. I thought, whatever. And they gave me a leaflet that looked like a beautiful family-run place.” She and Oscar went into a room while her family waited outside. “I was on a cold floor with Oscar. There was no blanket. It was cold in every way.” She cradled him in her arms. “He was blind and I wanted him to hear my voice, smell my scent, know he was safe, even though the place was alien. “Afterwards I just wanted to go home to cry. I left him on the floor and was given an itemised bill. It was massive. About £1,000 including the cremation. A lot of money to pay for a very miserable experience. I went home and after I stopped crying I googled the crematorium. Turns out it was part of the same corporate chain as the out-of-hours surgery.” Today, two of the Big Six veterinary groups own pet crematoria. “The ownership of pet crematoria by the large veterinary corporate groups clearly has an impact on our independent businesses,” states the Association of Private Pet Cemeteries and Crematoria in its submission to the CMA. “The ownership of these crematoriums is often not declared, even on their websites and they appear to be independent.” “It’s quite hard for normal pet owners to spot how all these things are linked,” says Cuddy. “It’s not like we can see the McDonald’s golden arches everywhere.” ‘All of us are buyable’ It turns out, furthermore, that there is another consequence of the “corporatisation” of veterinary clinics. Sarah’s cat was 12 when the vet diagnosed suspected cancer, around six years ago. Her local, independent vet in London had just been taken over by Medivet. “The vet said, ‘We’ll do a biopsy’, which involved cutting her open and removing all the tumours and sewing her up again.” The price: £1,000. “I was going to do it,” Sarah says, “and then I thought, I can’t put her through that. In the old days animals got sick and died. The vet wasn’t pushing it, he just assumed this is what you do: I’ve got an elderly cat with suspected cancer, we’ll immediately do a massive operation. I just thought, this is a bit insane.” Sarah decided against the treatment. Her cat died from cancer “very peacefully at home” six months later. “She just stopped eating and slept all day and then she died, which to me is how it should be.” Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean it should be done, says Bruce Fogle, vet for 55 years and the owner of London Vets, an independent practice in London (and father of Ben Fogle). “A diagnostically aggressive and expensive American approach to vet medicine has become standard in the UK,” he told Instagram followers during a recent discussion on the rise of “overdiagnosis” and “overtreatment” in corporately owned clinics. Bruce Fogle has been approached many times to sell his practice, but has always said no Bruce Fogle has been approached many times to sell his practice, but has always said no Credit: Jeff Gilbert What is best for the animal is not necessarily best for maximising profits. “A corporation doesn’t have a moral core to it,” Fogle tells me. “The aim of any corporation is to increase the financial return.” For their part, IVC Evidensia, CVS and Medivet point out that corporate veterinary practices benefit from extensive clinical expertise and significant financial investment not available to independent practice. All treatment decisions are based on clinical considerations and in clear consultation with the owner. Furthermore, each has co-operated with the CMA and is fully supportive of all efforts to deliver overall sector improvements including better pricing transparency. In 2022, Medivet was buying veterinary practices at great speed – 86 that year alone – so by April, it operated 390 clinics across the UK, arranged in a “hub-and-spoke” model, where smaller first-opinion practices encircled larger specialist hospitals that were open all day, every day. Corporates were “aggressive in their acquisition strategy”, says David Reader, who teaches competition law at Glasgow University. “Rolling up of local independent practices under a single ownership umbrella for the purpose of boosting the value of the collective fleet.” Reader and his frequent collaborator Scott Summers, an expert in business law at UEA Norwich Business School, are in the middle of a project looking at the consequences of private equity and corporate control of the veterinary market. “Pet owners in rural areas, in particular, lose out when the local vet is bought and shut down,” says Summers. But then, corporate chains were in a powerful position. They could offer to buy practices for “eight, nine, 10 times the profit of the business and it would still be profitable to them because they knew they could improve the efficiency”, says Fogle. “There are great efficiencies in running a number of businesses through a head office. If I own 20 practices and I need 20 X-ray machines, I’m going to get a far better price than if I was just buying one.” Fogle has been approached many times to sell, but has always said no. “But if I were younger and had to pay for my children’s education, say, or university fees, I’d have been an idiot to turn it down. All of us are buyable.” As it turned out, in January 2023, eight or so months before the current inquiry, the CMA turned its attention to Medivet’s purchase of 17 independent veterinary clinics bought between September 2021 and September 2022. The CMA was concerned that the new purchases squeezed out any competition in the local market. But before an in-depth review could get under way, Medivet offered to dispose of the practices that were the subject of the merger investigation. (The same thing happened when the CMA launched a review into specific purchases by CVS, VetPartners and IVC; each offered to sell off the practices.) In October 2023, Medivet sold the 17 practices at a loss of £21.9m. Will Chandler, 38, qualified as a vet 13 years ago. In his view, the dichotomy of corporate (bad) vs independent (good) is too simplistic. “There are some very well managed corporate clinics,” he says. They can provide better, more sophisticated equipment and more opportunities for advancement. But as lead vet for a Medivet clinic in London, where he worked for six years, it sometimes felt like “all the responsibility and none of the power”. He describes an environment of unrelenting pressure and a culture of price inflation. He had little influence over hiring staff. “I wasn’t given any CVs, any choice about which candidates to interview.” And with a large corporate structure, “I was always on my phone at weekends, in case someone had a question. And it wasn’t even my business.” Chandler wanted to go it alone. But he was constrained by a “non-compete” clause which prevented any veterinary business within a very tight radius around a Medivet clinic from opening. “Considering Medivet has 70-odd clinics in London, it’s almost impossible to find an area where you could set up a clinic without triggering a non-compete issue.” ‘We’re not owned by somebody in an office in a different country’ When he heard that Medivet were selling off clinics at knockdown prices, he jumped at the opportunity. He is now the co-owner of Brockwell Vets in Herne Hill, south London. His business partner is Jenny Kalogera, a veterinary surgeon and original owner of Brockwell Vets, who’d sold it to Medivet in 2021. “She didn’t like how it was run. Clients went elsewhere, and that was sad for her to see. When it was up for sale, I approached her. She said: ‘Why don’t we go into partnership together?’” “People love that we are independent,” says Chandler. He is now proud to set his own prices. “We charge £49.50 for a consultation and our dental fee is around £400 – significantly cheaper than the local corporate vet.” The Oxford Cat Clinic is another practice that was bought back from Medivet as a consequence of the CMA’s merger investigation. Weatherall, 58, had worked as the practice manager at the clinic for nine or so years when it was bought by Medivet in June 2022. She stayed on, along with the vets who’d founded the clinic 16 years before. Barely six months later, in January 2023, the CMA started to investigate and the clinic’s relationship with Medivet was paused. “We didn’t have a lot of time to be absorbed into the great Medivet machine,” says Weatherall. But it was long enough to get an insight into how things worked. “In a big corporate environment, you haven’t got the people who make decisions on the ground with you. It’s all centralised which is obviously more cost-effective. Which meant, for example, that we had to wait an interminable amount of time to get permission to buy anything, or if anything breaks – if a door handle comes off, you’ve got to wait for someone to come out and fix it, even though it could be driving the team mad.” When Medivet put the Oxford Cat Clinic up for sale, Weatherall decided to buy it. “I wanted to keep it out of the hands of the corporate. It’s really good for our clients to know we’re locally run. We’re not owned by somebody who’s in an office, sometimes in a different country, even, who has no idea what’s going on.” Melanie Weatherall: 'People are frightened to go to the vets because of the cost' Melanie Weatherall: ‘People are frightened to go to the vets because of the cost’ Credit: Harry Lawlor She talks about “pragmatic” care. “I adopted a cat recently. He was a stray. He had a damaged leg. We could have had about £3,000-plus of surgery to repair the leg, but did an amputation in the surgery because that’s a cheaper option and a reasonable option.” There should be budget vet options, says Paul Mankelow, chief vet at the Blue Cross animal charity. “I can walk into an Aldi and know it’s a different proposition to Waitrose. Similarly, do I want to fly easyJet or Emirates? It’s very clear. But it’s not clear in the veterinary market.” But running an independent practice is not easy. “I don’t draw any money from the business,” says Weatherall. “I earn no profit whatsoever. I want to change that.” Sadly, it looks as if the CMA market investigation is not going to be quite as effective as everyone hoped. One of its purposes was to address alleged monopolistic pricing and ownership in the veterinary industry. But there are signs the investigation has pivoted away from the more profound problems of the corporate sector. This January, Marcus Bokkerink stepped down as chair of the CMA, just three years into his role, as the watchdog moves to better align itself with the Government’s “push for growth”. “The Government’s strategic steer to the CMA is that it shouldn’t be doing anything which gives any outward impression that the UK is not business- or investment-friendly,” says Reader. Doug Gurr, a former head of Amazon UK, is now the interim chair. “That doesn’t mean no regulation – we all want to see safe, high-quality care. But the system has to be fair and proportionate for both large national groups and small local practices,” says Martin Coleman, chair of the CMA’s inquiry group. “We’re very supportive of the investigation, we’re glad it’s happening. However, one of our concerns is that the remedies won’t go far enough to put any real constraints on business, but they will go far enough to create extra work and additional paperwork for people working on the front line of veterinary medicine,” says Suzanna Hudson-Cooke, branch chairman of the British Veterinary Union in Unite. “Initially, I thought it would be great. Now I think I was naive,” says Chandler. “As a small business, we’re looking potentially at an increase in administrative burden and we’re meant to be a clinic that the CMA looks after.” *Names have been changed Join the conversation Show 481 comments The Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our commenting policy. Related Topics Telegraph long reads, Dogs, Cats, Animals © Telegraph Media Group Holdings Limited 2025 -
@malumbu your original post is a bit confising with multiple, possibly unrelated, concepts thrown together. Let's address the title of the thread. What are you looking for here, objecting to people flying their national flag? Tying to draw extreme comments out or associating flag flying with the far right ? The real qquestion possibly is should we feel ashamed to fly the flag? Possibly not, however the reasons for flying it should not be hijacked by political or extremism motivations. We shouldn't be ashamed of our flag, but a minority seem to be using ir to incite hatred against others. Therefore the real debate should be around how to remove the extremist views from ability to put a flag up? I don't have an answer and we won't get one on here but good to have a discussion that may stir a few thoughts. -
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Morley college usually has very good courses for sewing and textiles.
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