How to check a company director in the UK

Anyone can look up a UK company director for free. The register kept by Companies House is public, and it holds every appointment a person has held at a UK company, with the documents those companies filed. The difficulty is not access. It is knowing which parts to read, how to tell one John Smith from another, and how long a thorough reading takes.

Start with the officer search

On the Companies House service (find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk), search for the person’s name and choose “Officers”. Each result is an officer record: a page listing the appointments Companies House has linked under one name, date of birth and address. For each appointment it shows the company, the role, the appointment date and, where the person has left, the resignation date.

Two things make this harder than it looks.

• One person usually has more than one officer record. Companies House creates a new record when a filing gives a different spelling, middle name, or correspondence address, so a director of ten companies may be spread over three or four pages.
• Different people share names. The register shows only the month and year of birth, so two people of the same name born in the same month cannot be told apart from the search page. You have to compare addresses, co-directors and dates across records.

Read the appointment list

For each company on each record, note:

• the company’s status (active, dissolved, in liquidation, in administration, or with a strike-off proposed), and when it changed;
• the dates of the person’s appointment and resignation, set against the dates of any insolvency or strike-off;
• how many companies were dissolved, and how close together;
• whether the person was the only director, or one of several.

The pattern matters more than any single entry. Many good businesses end in a solvent strike-off, and one failure is part of trading. A sequence of companies that each lasted two years and were struck off with accounts overdue is a different thing, and it only shows when the records are read together.

Open the filing history

Every company page has a “Filing history” tab. Most of what a report is built from is here, as PDFs:

• accounts, which for small companies are usually a balance sheet and notes without a profit and loss account, so the figures to read are net current assets, creditors, and the notes on related-party transactions and directors’ loans;
• confirmation statements, which show the shareholders of a private company and the people with significant control;
• charges, which show who has security over the company’s assets;
• insolvency documents, above all the statement of affairs, which lists what the company owned and owed when it failed;
• strike-off applications, objections and Gazette notices, which show how a company came to be dissolved.

Older filings are scanned paper. They cannot be searched, and reading them means reading every page.

Check the other public registers

• The register of disqualified directors, which Companies House also publishes. See director disqualification.
• The Gazette, where petitions to wind up a company must be advertised. A petition that was later dismissed leaves no trace on the Companies House register. See winding-up petitions.
• Registers outside the company record. A Check the Director report searches the UK Sanctions List, the US Treasury’s and the EU’s sanctions lists, the Individual Insolvency Register (personal bankruptcy, debt relief and bankruptcy restrictions), The Gazette’s personal insolvency notices back to 1998, HMRC’s list of deliberate tax defaulters, the Charity Commission’s registers of trustees and of removed trustees, the FCA’s register of approved and prohibited individuals, and France’s register of companies and Norway’s register of roles, where a director is shown only if born in the same month and year, under every name the person has used at Companies House. The Register of Judgments, Orders and Fines (county court judgments) and the registers of any other regulator the person’s profession falls under are for you to check yourself.

Where the hours go

For a person with a handful of appointments, a careful check takes an afternoon. For a serial director it takes days: linking the records, listing perhaps forty companies, opening the filings for each, reading six years of accounts and every insolvency document, and writing down what you found with its source so that someone else can check it. None of it is hard. All of it is slow, and the moment it is skimmed the point is lost.

That is the job a Check the Director report does. It links the officer records and shows you its confidence in each link, so you confirm which records are the person. It then reads the filings of every company they were an officer of, cites each figure to the document and page, measures what it found against twenty-eight published criteria, and ends with the questions worth asking the person. It does not grade anyone. See the sample report for what that looks like.

This guide describes the public record in general terms, for England and Wales unless it says otherwise. It is not legal advice.