The register is used 14 billion times a year and the new rules are designed to ‘improve the quality and reliability of the register. Cleaning up the register will not happen overnight but it will enable us to improve transparency,’ Companies House said. ‘We will use data matching to check the company details and we will do more and more as time passes.’

Most of the changes require significant IT investment and will take place over a number of years with a need to hire more specialist investigators. Companies House has already heavily invested in data science capabilities so they can be ‘ahead of the curve in terms of our future capabilities. We recognise that technology is changing all the time and we have to keep pace with that’.

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