How big business pushed up vet bills

I was on my way to a Pilates class when I spotted Paul waving at me urgently from across the road at the bus stop. ‘Can you help, Miss,’ he said. ‘It’s Gladys, she’s in a bad way.’ I looked down at his Staffordshire bull terrier and immediately saw what he meant. The 16-year-old dog was trembling, panting and appeared to be struggling to stand. She’d also lost a lot of weight. I’ve known Paul and Gladys for the past eight years, running into them on the street near my home in east London. Paul is not wealthy and has a couple of disabilities. He always calls me Miss.

‘She’s got bad in the past few days,’ he said. ‘She’s not eating, she just paces and can’t lie down. I took her to a vet yesterday. I think it’s time for her to go. But Miss, I just couldn’t do it on my own.’ As we bundled Gladys on to the bus for the short ride to her vet, I knew there were going to be some painful decisions.

In my grandparents’ generation it was relatively simple to have a pet: you fed them, exercised them and then at some point they would get sick and die. Today, however, pet ownership has become more complicated and much more costly. It’s not cheap to end a pet’s life and Paul survives on Universal Credit. The Office for National Statistics estimates vet and other pet services have increased in price by around 60 per cent since 2015.

A couple of years ago, the Competition and Markets Authority began a review into Independent Vet Care Limited’s takeover of eight vet businesses (IVC is already the largest provider of vet services in the UK) as part of its monitoring of mergers and acquisitions.