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Companies House is an Executive Agency of the United Kingdom Government in the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. All limited companies in Great Britain are registered with Companies House and file specific details as required by the Companies Act 1985.
The United Kingdom has had a system of company registration since 1844. The legislation governing company registration matters is the Companies Act 1985 updated by Companies Act 1989.
Companies House has 2.1 million companies on the register and was one of the first National Company Registries to implement Electronic Company Formation. Now over 83% of companies are formed Electronically, and over 40% of documents filed electronicallyCompanies House Annual report 2005-2006[1].
Overseas companies that establish offices in Great Britain must also register with Companies House.
Gareth Jones is the Chief Executive of Companies House.
Companies House uses external companies to provide some of its services. The Companies House Contact Centre service is provided by Vertex Data Science. This contract has recently been extended for a further 5 years. The value of the contract is reportedly £12 million.
The Companies House Direct service and the website was run by Orchid Telematics. This contract came to an end as of 31 July 2006, and Orchid\'s function has been brought back within Companies House.
Companies House Website, Webfiling & WebCHeck service payment processing is dealt with by a company called Netbanx.
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The main office in Cardiff handles companies incorporated in England and Wales. These companies are subject to English law. There is another office at Nantgarw, Wales, which contains the Compliance Unit, Prosecuting Solicitors, Late Filing Penalties and the E-Filing Team. This office does not accept postal deliveries.
The London office deals mainly with document orders and collections and can provide same day incorporations for Companies in England and Wales.
The Registrar of Companies for England and Wales is the Chief Executive Claire Clancy. She will be stepping down from this post to take office as the Chief Executive of the National Assembly.
The Edinburgh office handles companies incorporated in Scotland. These companies are subject to Scots law.
The Registrar of Companies for Scotland is Dorothy Blair. Jim Henderson was the previous registrar.
All limited companies in Northern Ireland are registered with the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment [2]. Those companies are subject to Northern Ireland law.
Electronic Company Formation is not yet available for Northern Ireland Companies, and a different fee structure and process applies.
There are many different types of company:
Most new companies are formed by Company Formation Agents. One of the oldest Company Formation Agents is Jordans Ltd. who created the Company Formation business back in 1863. The change to Electronic Company Formation has seen a large shift in the market to online agents.
Companies House has now formed over 1,000,000 Companies Electronically, and 370,000 new companies were formed in 2005/6Companies House Annual report 2005-2006[3].
For an idea of scale the Delaware Division of Corporations the leading US registryDelaware DOC no business entities[4] has 695,000 businesses and 133,700 new incorporations in 2005.Delaware Department of State, Division of Corporations 2005 annual report[5]
The online services of Companies House are not available from midnight until 7am each day, and not at all on a Sunday WebFiling frequently asked questions[6]. Whilst Companies House state that this is to allow time for batch processing of data entered during the day Letter to Andrew Speakman[7], it places a significant obstacle to verifying trading and other details for UK registered companies by companies located overseas where the time difference can be as much as twelve hours. Distributed database systems as used by major services worldwide are now easily capable of processing \'tens of thousands\' of transactions in real-time.
Companies House have recently introduced a new mainframe computer system, CHIPS - Companies House Internal Processing System, that will allow the web-filing and web-check service to remain open 24 hours a day, everyday.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia
