Companies House: Changes to company registers

Companies House has announced that from 18 November 2025, companies will no longer be required to maintain registers of directors, directors’ residential addresses, secretaries or people with significant control over the company (PSCs). Instead, the specified information required under the Companies Act 2006 (CA 2006) will need to be filed at Companies House.

These changes result from the provisions of section 51 and Schedule 2 to the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 (ECCTA) which makes limited changes to certain of the information requirements that must now be met by notifying Companies House of that information so that it can be kept centrally. For example, it will no longer be necessary to provide the business occupation of directors (or equivalent) when their appointment is registered at Companies House.

From 18 November 2025, companies will also no longer be able to elect to hold information about the company’s officers on the central register at Companies House. They will also no longer be able to elect to hold their register of members at Companies House and will need to create and maintain their own shareholder register where such an election has been in place.

(Companies House, Changes to company registers, 08.08.2025)

SFO: Joint SFO-CPS Corporate Prosecution Guidance updated

On 18 August 2025, the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) published an updated version of the guidance, first published in October 2021, on the common approach of the Director for Public Prosecutions (DPP) and the Director of the SFO to the prosecution of corporate offending in England and Wales (Guidance).

The Guidance has been updated to take account of matters including the following:

• Reforms to the law of corporate criminal attribution for a wide range of economic crimes introduced by the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 (ECCTA). Criminal liability may be attributed to a body corporate or partnership under section 196 ECCTA for economic crime offences listed in Schedule 12 of ECCTA, where the offence is committed on or after 26 December 2023 by a “senior manager” acting within the actual or apparent scope of their authority, regardless of the size of the organisation.
• Section 199 ECCTA which will be effective from 1 September 2025. This introduces an either-way strict liability offence of corporate failure to prevent fraud by persons associated with a relevant body. The offence applies to “large organisations”, where an “associated person” commits a specified fraud offence with the intention of benefiting the organisation or a person to whom the organisation provides services, and also to certain parent undertakings where the fraud is committed by an associated person of a subsidiary for the benefit of the parent or a person to whom the parent provides services.
• New evidential considerations and forms of liability in light of the above ECCTA provisions.

(SFO, Joint SFO-CPS Corporate Prosecution Guidance, 18.08.2025)