Ownership Lookup
Most pet owners do not know. The Competition and Markets Authority found that roughly six in ten UK veterinary practices now sit inside a larger group, often trading under a local name that gives no hint of who owns the business or sets the prices. Enter your postcode below to see, for any practice near you, whether it is independently owned, part of a UK veterinary group such as IVC Evidensia, CVS, Medivet, VetPartners or Linnaeus, a Pets at Home joint venture, or run by a charity.
Ownership is one of several signals worth checking before you switch practice. It helps explain whether two clinics on a high street are actually independent choices, where pricing and policy decisions sit, and whether the referral service or out-of-hours provider you are sent to is owned by the same group as your day practice. It does not, on its own, tell you whether a practice provides good care or whether an independent is always cheaper than a larger group; for that, the price comparison and review data on each practice profile are more useful.
Rightvet classifies every UK first-opinion practice into one of six ownership tiers: independent (a single practice or a small partnership owned and run by working vets), small independent group (two to fourteen sites under one owner), medium independent group (fifteen or more sites, but not one of the five largest), Pets at Home joint venture (where the named vet is the operating partner inside a Pets at Home store), and the five largest UK consolidators — IVC Evidensia, CVS, Medivet, VetPartners and Linnaeus. Charities such as PDSA, RSPCA and Blue Cross sit alongside the commercial tiers with subsidised pricing. The look-up uses Companies House filings and RCVS practice records so the answer reflects who really owns the legal entity, not just the local trading name on the door.