What was claimed
From 1 October every pet dog and cat in the UK will be subject to a £100 annual fee.
Our verdict
This is not a real government policy. A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs told us it is completely false.
We’ve spotted several videos circulating on Facebook and TikTok claiming that from 1 October the government is introducing a £100 annual fee for “every dog and cat in the UK”.
But this isn’t the case. A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) told us this is “completely false”, and Full Fact couldn’t find any evidence that such a policy exists.
Several slightly different videos making this claim have been posted on TikTok and Facebook, with one viewed more than 2 million times. They claim that the charges are part of an “animal welfare initiative”.
The audio appears to ape Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s voice, and clues such as the even cadence and unnatural intonation suggest it has been created using artificial intelligence, though we can’t rule out that it has been faked another way, for example by using an impersonator. You can read more about how to spot AI audio, and the challenges of doing this, in our guide.
This video is part of a trend we have spotted on social media in recent months involving videos, often originating on TikTok, that make alarmist and false claims about the government’s changes to finance rules and limits on personal freedoms. Our recent investigation found such videos have been shared hundreds of thousands of times.
Before sharing videos such as this that you see online, first consider whether they come from a trustworthy and verifiable source. Our Full Fact toolkit contains guides and tips to help you navigate information online.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because this is not a real government policy in the UK.
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