UK companies API: Meet Business Register of UK
The most important information about UK companies: UK Companies House business register, its data scope, list of free company information, number of companies in the UK in January 2021 by legal forms.
Previously, we wrote about commercial registers of Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Poland and Slovakia. Now it’s time for the United Kingdom and its registry, commonly known as Companies House.
Meet Companies House — Business Register of UK
United Kingdom’s official business register is Companies House and it is equivalent to the national court registers of 3 separate countries: England and Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland. By law, it is subject to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), but functionally it is an executive agency and also a trading fund of Her Majesty’s Government. An interesting fact is that although Companies House was founded in 1988, its roots date back to 1844, when the first legislation on joint-stock companies was created.
It is worth noting that as a member of the UK Public Data Group, Companies House is really developing digitally and makes efforts to ensure that the information collected in this business register is made available in an open, free form. A key year in the evolution of this registry was 2015, when CHS (Companies House service) was made public and a free API was released to it.
Basic information about companies in the UK is available free of charge. For certified copies and financial reports of UK companies, you have to pay a fee.
The approach to Companies House users is also modern. It even runs his own blog, where you can read about the planned work, strategies for the coming years or get to know the faces of the people employed in it. So it communicates with the public like a well-run private company, and not a rigid government entity that assumes that “we have a monopoly anyway, so we don’t have to be polite”.
Are all UK companies registered with Companies House?
Almost all popular forms of businesses in the UK are registered with Companies House. The only exception is the legal form known as sole trader (sole proprietorship) and general partnerships. Company information on those entities is being kept by HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs), which is a department of the UK Government whose major responsibility is the collection of taxes.
The rest of legal forms of UK companies can be easily found in Companies House service CHS. Those are:
- private limited companies (LTD)
- limited liability partnerships (LLP)
- limited partnerships (LP)
- public limited companies (PLC)
- private unlimited companies
- charitable incorporated organisations (CIO)
- community interest companies (CIC)
- Societas Europaea
- Royal Charter companies (RC).
How to verify a company in the UK Business Register?
The company search engine available on the Companies House website is extremely easy to use. Just go to the UK business register page and then enter the company name, number or officer name.
For example, the profile of one of the largest UK companies, the 6th largest bank in the world by 2020, HSBC, looks like this:
What kind of business information Companies House provides?
UK Companies House provides for free only basic information about companies from England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland. There are enough of them to verify the contractor, but they are not profound. If we want to find the latest financial statements of UK companies, we need to pay a fee to CHS.
UK Business Register, Companies House, provides exactly these types of business information on UK companies:
- CRN number (company’s registration a number that usually takes the form of 8 digits or 6 digits with a letter prefix indicating the legal form of the company — e.g. LP122444. Popular prefixes are: “OC” for LLPs and “LP” for limited partnerships)
- company name
- legal form type
- company status
- country of origin (England, Wales, Northern Ireland or Scotland)
- SIC numbers (main, second, third and forth type of business activity code that tell us about a business nature of an entity)
- insolvency status
- dates of made up company accounts and returns
- main company address
- incorporation date
- dissolution date
- information on related companies (company name and address)
- Information on related people (management board, directors etc. — their names, roles, occupations, date of birth, addresses and the date from which they started to perform a specific function in the company)
- information on people with significant control (names, addresses, dates of birth, voting rights or ownership of shares).
How many companies are in the UK? Data from CHS 2021
Due to the fact that our UK Companies API collects data from Companies House service (CHS), we can easily provide you with the current number of companies currently operating in the UK.
Consequently, currently, as of mid-January 2021, Companies House’s business register contains over 4.3 million active UK companies. If legal entities already dissolved were added to the information about active enterprises in the UK, then in the Companies House database we find information on over 6.5 companies and 21.7 million entrepreneurs.
Are you wondering how many of them are limited companies and how many LTD, LLP or PLC are in the UK in 2021?
Below are the detailed numbers:
- 4,1 million private limited companies (LTD)
- 43,7 thousand limited liability partnerships (LLP)
- 50 thousand limited partnerships (LP)
- 5,4 thousand public limited companies (PLC).
UK Companies API
UK companies API, which is based on data from Companies House, is one of our regulatory solutions addressed to companies that are looking for reliable information for due diligence processes.
Full UK companies API documentation you can view HERE.
On the other hand, you can read about other APIs providing information from foreign registers, our ISO / IEC 27001 and our clients on the Transparent Data website.
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