Companies House to mark verified officers on register
Companies House will add a clear note to the public register showing when a named director or LLP member has had their identity verified. The legal instrument behind this is S.I. 2025/1116, signed on 22 October 2025 and laid before Parliament on 23 October 2025. Its provisions start when the linked identity‑verification sections of the Companies Act 2006 are commenced by government.
Why this matters for you is simple: trust and traceability. Once the registrar issues a notice under the Registrar (Identity Verification and Authorised Corporate Service Providers) Regulations 2025 (S.I. 2025/50), the person’s entry must display that their identity is verified. In practice, the notice follows either the outcome of the person’s verification application or the delivery of a verification statement by an authorised provider.
The same duty applies to limited liability partnerships, so the LLP register will also show who is verified. Required member information is updated too: individuals are recorded by name and date of birth, and records must state whether someone is a designated member. For corporate members, the ‘designated member’ flag is added while the earlier service‑address item is paused until Companies House brings that field online.
A unique identifier sits at the centre of filings. Whenever a form says an individual’s identity is verified (within the meaning of section 1110A of the Companies Act 2006), that form must also include the person’s unique identifier created under the 2025 verification rules. You will see this on core events such as company formation, officer updates and statements about people with significant control.
Unregistered companies are brought firmly into scope. The registrar may add plain‑English notes to their entries showing when documents were delivered, replaced or removed, and can add context where material could mislead or confuse. If someone listed as a director is actually subject to director‑disqualification sanctions, that status must be flagged, including the date and any licence or exception that applies. Failure to comply with an official information notice can also be noted.
Transitional rules help existing officers move across. For unregistered companies, each pre‑existing director must have an identity‑verification statement delivered with the company’s next confirmation statement during a 12‑month window that begins on the ‘relevant day’ (the date the new prohibition on acting while unverified starts). If the company does not file in that window, the duty carries over to the next confirmation statement, so long as the person is still a director.
Timing protections are built in so you are not caught out mid‑cycle. If, on the relevant day, a company’s confirmation‑statement delivery period has already started, the prohibition on a director acting while unverified waits until the company files or the deadline passes. Where a confirmation statement is already overdue on that day, the prohibition applies on the earlier of fixing the filing or 14 days after the relevant day.
LLPs get the same pathway. Each LLP must deliver an identity‑verification statement for every existing individual member with its next confirmation statement during the 12‑month transition. The duty falls away if the person has left before filing, and the same 14‑day rule applies if the LLP begins the period with an overdue statement.
Alongside these headline changes are technical tidy‑ups. Because the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 removed some local‑register duties, older rectification provisions are trimmed. A cross‑reference in the Companies (Companies Authorised to Register) Regulations 2009 now correctly points to S.I. 2025/50 for unique‑identifier rules, and a small fix aligns overseas‑company provisions with the right subsections of section 167M.
People‑data fields are being sequenced. Nationality for LLP members and some service‑address requirements for corporate actors are deferred for now, with government stating that Companies House will implement those items later. One amendment is timed to start immediately after the new duty to notify ‘confirmed persons with significant control’ goes live.
If you are learning how to read legislation, this instrument is a neat case study. ‘Made’ means the minister signed it on 22 October 2025; ‘laid’ means Parliament formally received it on 23 October 2025; ‘coming into force’ here is linked to when section 167M of the Companies Act 2006 and connected provisions commence. The ‘relevant day’ for the transition is the start date of section 43 of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023.
The rules are signed by Blair McDougall at the Department for Business and Trade. The government’s explanatory note says no separate impact assessment was needed for this instrument because the wider analysis sits with the 2023 Act and the 2025 identity‑verification regulations. For students, teachers and founders, the takeaway is practical: identity checks become visible on Companies House, and new annotations make the public record easier to read and teach from.