Six Companies Own 60% of UK Vets, and Workers Are Sick of It

Poorly kittens are big business.

by Polly Smythe
4 September 2024

A protestor outside Valley Vets in South Wales

When Valley Vets, a veterinary practice in South Wales, was bought by VetPartners in April 2017, there was no sign for pet owners that the independently owned outfit had been snapped up by a private equity firm; the practice retained its name, branding and staff.

Seven years later and a noisy picket line outside Valley Vets should help any pet owners still in the dark over who really owns their vet.

The strike – the first ever at a UK private veterinary practice – is over the harm that the for-profit model has inflicted on animals and veterinary staff alike. On the picket line, vets, animal support staff, nurses, and receptionists hold up homemade placards: “Pets before profits”; “Freedom from high fees”; “FFS: fair pay, fair fees, smaller profits.”

Workers at Valley Vets walked out on 16 July. After an initial 15 strike days, they decided to stay on strike until the end of August.

The crux of the strike is money: staff don’t make enough of it; pet owners fork out too much of it; and with an estimated value of £3bn, VetPartners could afford to hand over much more of it. Workers are demanding that the lowest-paid workers be paid the real living wage of £12 an hour, with pay rises in line with inflation for the rest.

Pet care wasn’t always big business. Until a legal change in 1999, only qualified and licensed vets could own a veterinary practice, meaning that vets tended to be independent practices or small local chains. “Back then, it was normal for veterinary surgeons to work in a practice, buy into the partnership and end up as a partner at their own practice,” said Suzanna Hudson-Cooke, chair of the British Veterinary Union (BVU), part of Unite.

Deregulation chipped away at the small business model, allowing corporations to quietly gobble up clinics. In 2013, only 10% of vet practices were owned by the “big six”: Pets at Home, CVS Group, IVC, Linnaeus, VetPartners and Medivet. Fast-forward to 2024 and it’s 60%.

VetPartners, owned by the private equity firm BC Partners, isn’t alone in keeping its clinics’ former brand identities intact when it acquires them. Four of the big six are guilty of the practice, leaving pet owners no inkling that their local veterinary practice is now part of a multinational corporation.

Linnaeus is owned by American chocolate giant Mars, who are also behind pet food brands like Whiskas. Among Medivet’s investors is LGT Capital Partners, a Swiss private equity vehicle owned by the Liechtenstein royal family. IVC – the biggest of the six – is owned by Nestlé and private equity firms Silver Lake and EQT.

The Covid-19 boom in pet ownership made the sector attractive to investors: during the pandemic, more than 3.2m UK households are thought to have taken on a pet. More than half of UK households – 57% – now own a pet.

The big six aren’t just snapping up veterinary practices, but also related facilities: diagnostic laboratories, referral centres, out-of-hours suppliers, crematoriums, pharmacies, locum agencies and veterinary nursing schools. They’re also investing heavily in upping the standard of care available for animals. From MRIs to oncologists, and behavioural experts, treatment options are more sophisticated – and expensive – than ever.

Treatment costs for animals have skyrocketed: over the last two years, the BVU says that Valley Vets has put up fees by 25%. Fees have risen so high that treatments often cost more than pets are insured for. “Back in the day, we would consider breaching a pet owner’s insurance policy to be an exception,” a vet from Valley Vets, who asked that Novara Media not use their name for fear of retaliation. “Nowadays, it happens all the time.”

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the government competition regulator, launched an investigation into the veterinary market in 2023 after identifying “multiple concerns” about the domination of the veterinary market by the big six. Among these concerns was that acquisition sprees and investment mean corporations have an incentive to “offer and promote highly sophisticated treatments.”

Put simply, having spent vast quantities of money on facilities and treatments, vets feel under pressure from their corporate owners to claw that money back – often at the expense of pet owners. Staff at Valley Vets told Novara Media they feel under pressure to charge for every small thing and can be subjected to audits on so-called “charge leakage” – money “lost” when a service isn’t charged for.

The CMA is also investigating the practice of referring a pet for testing at another service owned by the same company – often without veterinary staff realising they are doing it. Sometimes true ownership is so well-disguised that “the people working in the practices won’t even know that an external service is actually owned by the same parent company,” said Hudson-Cooke.

Corporations have banked on our increased devotion to pets translating into a readiness to spend more money on them. CVS’s latest annual report described pet care makes as a “favourable sector” given the “continued humanisation of pets and appetite for innovation.” And they’re right: a 2022 Dogs Trust poll suggested that one in 10 UK dog owners have gone into debt to pay for their dog’s care.

Staff at Valley Vets say that the steep rise in fees has led to pet owners being forced to reject treatment on the basis of cost. At its starkest, vets are seeing more “economic euthanasia”: pet owners opting to put down an animal with a good chance of recovery because they can’t afford to treat them.

“Not being able to help animals, which is what we’ve been trained to do and what we love to do, is causing staff distress,” said the Valley Vets employee.

Corporatisation has also meant increased workloads: Valley Vets staff report seeing a new animal every 15 to 20 minutes for hours. Not only is this stressful for staff, but it means that the chance of making a mistake ­- accidental overdose, admitting the wrong animal, delivering incorrect news to an anxious pet owner – shoots up.

It’s the largely female support staff at the practice, paid pennies above the minimum wage, at the sharp end of rising fees. “They get shouted out by a stressed out angry client whose dying dog they cannot afford to help,” said the Valley Vets vet.

Hudson-Cooke isn’t dewy-eyed about the old vet business model, which had poor employment conditions and pay. But at least vets had “clinical autonomy”.

“When the practice is owned by a veterinary professional, decision-making about the reinvestment of profit centres on clinical matters,” Hudson-Cooke said. “When your company is owned by private equity, reinvestments are made on the basis of generating more profit.”


Polly Smythe is Novara Media’s labour movement correspondent.