14 Facts About Companies House

Companies House is the United Kingdom's registrar of companies and is an executive agency of His Majesty's Government, falling under the remit of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

The Act created the office of the Registrar of Joint Stock Companies House to maintain the register of companies, which was publicly accessible.

Joint Stock Companies House Act 1844 applied only to England and Wales, and Ireland; it did not apply to Scotland.

Joint Stock Companies House Act 1856 abolished the dual registration system of the 1844 Act; 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 House, including memoranda and articles of association, and annual reports.

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The first Registrar of Joint Stock Companies for Scotland was George Deane, from 1856 to 1858, before he was transferred to the London office of Companies House to be Chief Clerk to the Registrar for England and Wales.

In October 1988, Companies House became an executive agency of the Department of Trade and Industry, and then in October 1991 started to operate as a trading fund, self-financing by retaining income from charges.

Companies House was a member of the Public Data Group, an advisory board which between 2011 and 2015 sought to improve public access to government data.

Role of Registrar of Companies House is not a political one, and the incumbent is a civil servant.

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.

Generally, undertakings registered with Companies House are required to indicate their legal form in their names:.

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy announced in 2020 that Companies House would be given powers to verify the identities of company directors, but did not set a timetable for their introduction.

In February 2008, The Times and Computer Weekly 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 exercise 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.