New rules to combat economic crime: company law changes from March 2024

Companies House has confirmed that some of the changes being made to company law by the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 (see here) will be introduced in March 2024.

What is changing?

The changes include:

• Greater powers to query information – Companies House will be able to scrutinise and reject information that appears incorrect or inconsistent with information already on the register. In some cases, it will be able to remove information.
• Stronger checks on company names – where they may give a false or misleading impression to the public.
• New rules for registered office addresses – all companies will need to have an appropriate address at all times. This means companies will not be able to use a PO Box as their registered office address. 
• All companies will be required to supply a registered email address to Companies House with their next confirmation statement (or on incorporation for new companies). The same address can be used for multiple companies (e.g. in a group). Companies may wish to set up a bespoke email address for these purposes so that it can be monitored even when people are on leave.
• Statement of lawful purpose – a new requirement to confirm on incorporation that the company is being formed for a lawful purpose. Companies will also need to confirm on their annual confirmation statement that their future activities will be lawful.

What do you need to do now?

If your company’s registered office is a PO Box address, you will need to change this to an appropriate address by March 2024. This means an address where documents sent to the registered office will come to the attention of a person acting on behalf of the company and can be recorded by an acknowledgement of delivery.

Otherwise there is nothing to do until the next confirmation statement is due (after these changes are introduced in March 2024), at which time a registered email address will need to be supplied to Companies House and the new statement of lawful purpose will need to be included.

More information

These changes were announced in a Companies House blogpost here and more information is available on the Companies House changes to UK Company law website. Companies House will publish more details about what companies will need to do via its blog.

Our Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Hub brings together cross-practice expertise and commentary on the different aspects of the Act.