Dog kennelling costs (FOI 456/26)
FOI Request Reference: 456/26
Thank you for your request for information, received 13/2/2026
Request
1) For each of the years 2023, 2024 and 2025, the total amount spent by your police force on veterinary bills and the cost of kennelling, in relation to suspected banned dogs.
(If this information is only stored in financial years, please provide it for April 2022-2023, April 2023-2024, and April 2024-2025.)
2) For each of the years 2023, 2024 and 2025, the number of dogs which were euthanised after being seized by the force.
Response
Please find enclosed our response:
Our data is not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide this information within the appropriate (cost) limit within the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act (see ‘Reason for Decision’ below).
Although excess cost removes the force’s obligations under the Freedom of Information Act, as a gesture of goodwill I have supplied information, relative to your request, retrieved before it was realised that the fees limit would be exceeded. I trust this is helpful, but it does not affect our legal right to rely on the fee’s regulations for the remainder of the request.
1) For each of the years 2023, 2024 and 2025, the total amount spent by your police force on veterinary bills and the cost of kennelling, in relation to suspected banned dogs.
|
Date |
Kennelling - Dangerous Dogs |
Veterinary Services - Dangerous Dogs |
Amount |
|
Apr 22 - Mar 23 |
|
|
We did not capture the cost individually for Dangerous Dogs - in order to provide the level of detail you have requested, it would be necessary to conduct a manual examination of records. Such a search however, would exceed 18 hours |
|
Apr 23 - Mar 24 |
|
|
We did not capture the cost individually for Dangerous Dogs - in order to provide the level of detail you have requested, it would be necessary to conduct a manual examination of records. Such a search, however, would exceed 18 hours |
|
Apr 24 - Mar 25 |
|
|
We did not capture the cost individually for Dangerous Dogs - in order to provide the level of detail you have requested, it would be necessary to conduct a manual examination of records. Such a search, however, would exceed 18 hours |
|
Apr 25 - Feb 26 (to date) |
£952,439.43 |
£221,372.94 |
This financial year we commenced to capture the cost separately for Dangerous Dogs and Operational Dogs. |
2) For each of the years 2023, 2024 and 2025, the number of dogs which were euthanised after being seized by the force.
Under section 21 of the Act, we are not required to provide information in response to a request if it is already reasonably accessible to you. The information you requested is available on the following website:
dog-publication-statistics-2020---2025.pdf (westmidlands.police.uk)
Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that this data has been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request may be subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are considered when interpreting the data.
The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of data which has relevance to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be considered when those data are used.
If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data, we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.