Companies House Reform

We are now starting to see some practical impacts of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act.

From 4th March when the annual confirmation statement is submitted to Companies House, the following two additional bits of information must be given:

• An e-mail address.
• Confirmation that the intended future activities of the company will be lawful.

We have obtained confirmation that the e-mail address will not be available on the public record and for now, will not be used as a primary form of communication.

Other changes which have now been brought in are as follows:

A registered office is now defined as being an ‘appropriate address’. What this means is that a companies registered office address must be somewhere that:

• A document addressed to the company and delivered by post or hand would be expected to come to the attention of a person acting on behalf of the company and;
• The delivery of documents there is capable of being recorded by the obtaining of an acknowledgement of delivery.

These changes mean that the use of PO Boxes will no longer be possible.

The registrar has greater powers to query and challenge information that appears to be incorrect or inconsistent with information already held. There will also be stronger checks on company names which may give a false or misleading impression to the public.

Annotations will be added to the register to let users know about potential issues with previously filed information and steps will start to be taken to clean up the register by data matching to identify and remove inaccurate information.

There are further changes expected in the coming months and we will keep you updated on these.

It has also been announced that Companies House fees are increasing with effect from 1 May 2024. Full details of the increases can be seen here Changes to Companies House fees - Changes to UK company law. The annual confirmation statement fee is increasing from £13 to £34.