Enforcing the XL Bully ban has placed a ‘huge burden on policing’ and could end up costing as much as £25million to implement, police chiefs have warned.
The National Police Chiefs’ Council painted a gloomy picture of the ban, which first came into effect in England and Wales in February 2024 following a spate of horrific attacks on the public.
Bosses stressed that kennel spaces were ‘reaching capacity’ and millions of pounds were being spent on veterinary bills, which were ‘increasing by the day’.
The overall cost of kennelling banned dog breeds had ballooned from £4m in 2018 to more than £11m between February and September 2024 – costing around £11,000 a month to keep an XL bully in the doghouse.
This figure is expected to ‘rise to as much as £25million’ for the period from February 2024 to April 2025 – a predicted 500% increase in police costs from 2018.
For the last 11 months, it has been a criminal offence to own an XL bully dog in England and Wales without an exemption certificate, meaning unregistered pets will be taken and owners possibly fined and prosecuted.
Similar legislation came into effect in Scotland in August.
Other banned types of dog under section 1 of the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991 include the pit bull terrier, Japanese tosa, dogo Argentino and fila Brasileiro.
When the new laws came in, the government estimated there were around 10,000 XL Bully dogs in England and Wales. However, this was a major underestimate, with the figure more like 57,000.
Between February and September 2024 alone, officers seized 4,586 suspected section 1 banned dogs throughout England and Wales.
Chief constable Mark Hobrough, the NPCC’s lead for dangerous dogs, said the force ‘urgently needed help’ from the Government in ‘coping with the huge demand the ban has placed’ on their resources.
He told the Guardian: ‘We are facing a number of challenges in kennel capacity, resourcing and ever-mounting costs, and as of today we have not received any additional funding to account for this.’
Whilst discussions have begun with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Mr Hobrough said there was no formal agreement or funding received to deal with these ‘additional demand factors’.
Policing the ban has proved to be made more challenging because working out whether a dog is an XL Bully can require specialist training or external expertise, which means keeping them in kennels for longer.
Before the ban, there were 120 dog liaison officers across England and Wales.
But the NPCC said 100 more were subsequently trained and a further 40 in place to gain the qualification, which meant in ‘some areas established dog handlers have been called away from other policing duties’.
The NPCC also said about £560,000 had been spent by police forces on staff overtime between February and September last year in relation to canines.
NPCC tactical lead superintendent Patrick O’Hara said he did not think all XL bullies were automatically dangerous, adding: ‘In the right hands, with the right socialisation, with a really responsible owner, a lot of those dogs will never come to notice.’
An investigation in December 2024 found that police had destroyed more than three dangerous dogs a day on average since the XL Bully ban came in.
Based on FOI figures from 19 police forces in England and Wales, the BBC found that 818 dogs had been destroyed in the first few months of the ban, more than double than in 2023.
Despite the numbers of dangerous dogs being seized and destroyed rising in 2024, the number of attacks showed no sign of falling in many areas.
A BBC Freedom of Information request found that out of 25 police forces that responded, 22 said they predict they will see more reported incidents this year.
Lisa Willis, who was attacked by an XL Bully months after the ban came into force on December 31 last year, said the law was ‘useless’.
She said that the owners of dogs like the one that mauled her arm should not be allowed to buy further animals. The owner of the dog that attacked her replaced his dog ‘within weeks’.
Recalling her encounter with an XL Bully in June, Ms Willis told the BBC: ‘I just thought it was going to kill me,’ she said. ‘It was so powerful, it was literally hanging off my arm and no matter what, I just couldn’t get it off.’
She had been on a walk with her terrier, Duke, when a French bulldog attacked him. Then an XL Bully-type dog rushed out of a garden, crossed the road and mauled Ms Willis.
Ms Willis said her arm was ‘shredded’ and even asked her rescuers to call her husband to say ‘goodbye’ because she thought she was going to bleed to death.