Companies House is the executive agency of the British Government that maintains the register of companies, employs the company registrars and is responsible for incorporating all forms of companies in the United Kingdom.[3][4]

Prior to 1844, no central company register existed and companies could only be incorporated through letters patent and legislation. At the time, few incorporated companies existed; between 1801 and 1844, only about 100 companies were incorporated. The Joint Stock Companies Act 1844 created a centralised register of companies, enabled companies to be incorporated by registration, and established the office of the registrar; the Joint Stock Companies Act 1856 mandated separate registrars for each of the three UK jurisdictions. Initially just a brand, Companies House became an official executive agency in 1988.


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All public limited, private limited, private unlimited, chartered and some other companies are incorporated and registered with Companies House. The agency also registers limited partnerships, while most other enterprises fall under the purview of the Financial Conduct Authority. All limited companies (including subsidiary, small and inactive) must file annual financial statements with Companies House, all of which are public records. The agency is also responsible for dissolving companies.

From 2016, Companies House operated under the authority of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. This then became the Department for Business and Trade from 7 February 2023 following a Machinery of Government change initiated by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. The current chief executive is Louise Smyth, who also serves as registrar for England and Wales. The agency, as well as British company law in general, are governed by the Companies Act 2006. As of August 2023,[update] Companies House maintains 5.32 million active companies.[5]

Prior to 1844, companies could only be incorporated through grant of a royal charter, by private act of Parliament,[6] or, from 1834, by letters patent. Few companies were incorporated, with only approximately 100 companies being incorporated by private act between 1801 and 1844.[7] At this time, no central register of companies was in existence.

The origins of Companies House date back to 1844, the year the Joint Stock Companies Act received royal assent, enabling companies to be incorporated by registration for the first time.[8] The Act created the office of the Registrar of Joint Stock Companies to maintain the register of companies,[9] which was publicly accessible.[10] It was hoped by MPs of the day that a publicly accessible central company register would help to protect the public from fraud.[11] All companies, irrespective of their method of incorporation, were obliged to register within three months of the commencement of the Act.[7]

The Act provided for two types of company registration: provisional,[12] and complete.[13] The filing requirements for complete registration were more extensive than those for provisional registration.[12][13] Given that there was no requirement for companies granted a certificate of provisional registration to submit the remaining information in order to become completely registered, the Act was not hugely successful as many of its provisions applied only to completely registered companies.[14]

Prior to the commencement of the Limited Liability Act 1855, shareholders were generally treated similarly to partners in a common law partnership, and had unlimited liability for the debts and obligations of the companies in which they held shares.[16] From 1855, it became possible for shareholders to benefit from limited liability[17] as a matter of routine,[18][19] provided the companies in which they held shares were registered with the Registrar of Joint Stock Companies under the 1844 Act.[20] The aim of this act was to incentivise the creation of new joint stock companies, while giving investors, the majority of whom did not play an active role in day-to-day management, protection from liabilities incurred by company directors.[18]

The Joint Stock Companies Act 1856 abolished the dual registration system of the 1844 Act;[14] provisional registration ceased to be possible. In exchange for providing shareholders with the benefit of limited liability, companies were required to submit certain information to the Registrar for Joint Stock Companies, including memoranda and articles of association (which had not previously been divided in this way),[14] and annual reports.[16]

When the Companies Act 2006 was fully implemented on 1 October 2009, the Northern Ireland companies register was fully integrated into Companies House; previously, all limited companies in Northern Ireland were registered with the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment.[citation needed]

In view of the coronavirus pandemic, from 25 March 2020 companies were able to apply for a three-month extension to the annual deadline for filing their accounts and reports.[27] The Corporate Insolvency and Governance Act 2020 made this extension automatic for filing deadlines between 27 June 2020 and 5 April 2021; after the latter date, companies could again apply for a three-month extension.[36] There were also temporary extensions to the deadlines for filing confirmation statements and certain event-driven filings.[37]

The Registrar of Companies for England and Wales is based at Companies House, Cardiff,[38] and is responsible for the registration of companies in England and Wales. Until 2011 there was another Companies House office in Nantgarw, Wales. The London office of Companies House, located at Petty France, is purely a facility to file and view documents, which are then processed in Cardiff.

Notwithstanding the above, private limited companies need not indicate their legal form in their names if they are charities,[80] exempted by new regulations made by the Secretary of State,[81] or subject to a continuing exemption.[82]

The Register of Companies contains certificates of incorporation for all undertakings incorporated by registration with Companies House. Incorporation takes place on the issuance of a certificate of incorporation by the registrar.[85] Private limited companies can be issued with a certificate of incorporation within 24 hours of an application being submitted.[86]

Since June 2016, private companies can elect to keep certain statutory records on the central register which is held and published by Companies House, instead of maintaining their own registers.[98] These records include:[99]

In February 2008, The Times[100] and Computer Weekly[101] broke a story that almost 4,000 of the names on the Companies House register of directors were on international watchlists of alleged fraudsters, money launderers, terror financiers and corrupt officials. The results came from Datanomic who had screened the 6.8 million names on the register against a World-Check database of high risk individuals and businesses. The exercise also revealed more than 1,500 disqualified company directors were being allowed to run other UK companies as Companies House was not checking names against its register of disqualified persons.[102]

It is vital that directors be aware that they will no longer be able to file for or incorporate companies without a verified account. Whether verification is carried out via an ACSP or by the director, the process is likely to be an involved one and will require uploading identification documents to Companies House.

The Free Company Data Product is a downloadable data snapshot containing basic company data of live companies on the register. This snapshot is provided as ZIP files containing data in CSV format and is split into multiple files for ease of downloading.

Glad something is improving. We had someone fraudulently use our address for their business, and had to go through hoops to get it changed. We had to prove we had nothing to do with this business, was time consuming and stressful, with phonecalls, and providing documented evidence. It should never have happened, companies house need to diligently verify those registering, not innocent people having to put time and effort in to it to get documents changed that have absolutely to do with them.

Rebecca l totally agree .That businesses who are scammers and fraudsters should be named and shamed and not allowed to ever have a business again, or even be allowed to change name of company in order to carry on. My daughter is a victim of a builder registered at companies house, but only gives addresses of two registered offices, one being the accountants and the other the address where the business operates from, but l believe that the company directors home address should also be registered. When people have been victims of fraud then they should be allowed to report this to Companies House for them to investigate, to prevent this happening to others.

Please make sure that it does not become an administration nightmare for small company's and keep lost manhours to a minimum!

We are a small company without a shareholding set up to manage a private estate (essentially as a residents association). Our turnover is around 3,000.

We are plagued with: solicitors, house agents, banks, and now yourselves all demanding passports & photo documentation to estatblish identity and expected to deliver it all personally.

No organisation is free from being hacked either fraudulently or unintentionaly by staff so such documentation held by all these groups is a liability to us small company directors.

Please limit such requirements to larger companies and exclude the hundreds of small company's like ours because the hours spent doing this stuff is disproportionate in terms of our administration budgets.

Companies House runs virus checks against documents for late-filing applications without the need for managing servers by using AWS Lambda. Companies House maintains a register of limited companies in the UK. Document uploads to Amazon S3 trigger AWS Lambda to scan the materials for viruses.

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