Companies House is the United Kingdom's registrar of companies, established under the Companies Act and operating as an executive agency of the Department for Business and Trade. Its core function is to incorporate and dissolve limited companies, register the information those companies are legally required to file, and make that information available to the public. Every limited company, limited liability partnership, and several other entity types registered in England and Wales, Scotland, or Northern Ireland passes through its systems.
The agency holds records on millions of active and dissolved entities, and its free public register has long been a foundational data source for credit reference agencies, due diligence providers, journalists, and compliance teams across the private sector. The introduction of the Register of Overseas Entities in 2022, requiring foreign owners of UK property to disclose their beneficial ownership, marked a significant expansion of the agency's remit beyond domestic corporate transparency.
The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 gave Companies House substantially greater powers: the ability to query and reject suspicious filings, to cross-check data against other public bodies, and to take a more active role in combating the misuse of the register for fraud and money laundering. This shift from passive registry to active gatekeeper represents a material change in how the agency operates and what it demands from those filing with it.
For operators and compliance leads, Companies House is not merely an administrative obligation. The tightening of identity verification requirements and the agency's expanded querying powers mean that formation agents, accountants, and in-house legal teams need to revisit their onboarding and filing workflows. The broader trajectory, towards a cleaner, harder-to-abuse register, also raises the baseline standard for corporate transparency that counterparties and investors will increasingly expect.
