Companies House has published its business plan for what will be the fifth and final year of its 2020-25 strategy.

The business plan reiterates the six ‘strategic goals’ of Companies House’s five-year strategy and outlines what it intends to do to achieve them in the year ahead, particularly bearing in mind the coming into force of the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act 2022 (“ECCTA”), something the plan describes as introducing “the biggest changes to Companies House since corporate registrations were established in 1844”. Three of the six strategic goals relate to the general improvement of Companies House’s services, culture, and use of resources. The others set out more substantive areas of work, as follows:

1. Ensuring that registers inspire trust and confidence

Companies House states that it will “prioritise cleaning up the existing information on the registers by identifying and removing information that we know to be inaccurate”. As part of this process, it will require companies to provide “a registered email address and an appropriate registered office address”, and well as to confirm at the point of incorporation and annually thereafter that the company pursues a lawful purpose.

The plan also promises that Companies House will use its “new and enhanced powers” to reject information that has been submitted where it is clear that it is misleading, false, or suspicious, and to expedite the process of striking off companies where it has evidence of fraudulent information. The year ahead will also see the introduction of a registration process for third party agents to become authorised corporate service providers (“ACSPs”) as well as the introduction next spring of a technical capability to verify an individual’s identity which will be mandatory for anyone “setting up, running, owning or controlling a company in the UK, and those who file on behalf of companies”.

Finally, Companies House outlines plans to develop processes to supress personal information from the register (such as a registered office address if it is a person’s residential address) and to “begin development of process changes to impose limits on the use of corporate directors, subject to certain exemptions, as set out under the Small Business Enterprise and Employment Act 2015”.

2. Maximising the value of Companies House’s registers to the UK economy

The business plan points out that the information that Companies House publishes “is used to support millions of business decisions, with its transparency contributing to the UK being regarded as a world leading place to do business”. It states that the measures that are already under way to clean up the register, together with using powers under ECCTA, will improve the quality of information that Companies House provides which, in turn, will lead to an increase in trust and confidence in the system as a whole.

3. Combating economic crime through active use of analysis and intelligence

Empowered by the changes brought about through ECCTA, Companies House intends to do more to “gather, analyse and proactively share more intelligence than ever before” as well as work across government and with law enforcement organisations to tackle criminal activity. It commits itself to developing a “strategic intelligence assessment to identify and assess strategic threats posed to the UK through misuse of corporate structures” and working with others to set out a strategy to address those threats.

To read the business plan in full, click here