Companies Law is having a makeover! This means that there are going to be some changes for those of you with Limited Companies registered at Companies House! It is all in an effort to provide more transparency in the business environment and to give Companies House more teeth to ensure that their requirements are being adhered to! But what does it mean for you? Below is a brief summary of the main changes which will be introduced from March 2024.
Main changes
- Companies House will have greater powers to query information. We may see an increase in queries from Companies House if information provided to them is incorrect or inconsistent.
- There will be stronger checks on company names. Exactly what this means is unclear but I imagine it will make it more difficult to start a company which has a similar name to an existing company or to close a company that has large debts and open a similarly named company.
- New rules for registered office addresses meaning that companies will not be able to use a PO Box as their registered office address.
- All companies will need to supply a registered email address.
- All companies will need to confirm that they are forming the company for a lawful purpose when they incorporate and reconfirm this annually
- Annotations on the register will let users know about potential issues with the information that has been supplied to Companies’ House
- The register will be cleaned up using data matching to identify and remove inaccurate information
- Data will be shared with other government and law enforcement agencies
In the main, these changes are to stop fraudulent information being accepted and published on the register. There will be more coming but this is the first step.
If you have a limited company and you are law abiding then there will genuinely be no issues beyond a bit of tidy up if your information is out of date or incorrect but the hope is that over the coming years, as they implement further changes such as identify verification and streamlining filing options for small and micro-entity companies it will be harder and harder for limited companies to defraud customers, run tax avoidance scheme or break laws.
