Companies House ID verification stopped being a distant reform and became an actual task on my to do list this year, and if you hold a director role at a UK limited company it is either already on yours or about to be. Under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act, every director and every person with significant control now has to verify their identity with Companies House rather than simply declaring it on a form the way we all have for years.
I hold director appointments across a few different businesses, including two non executive positions, so this is not a hypothetical for me. I have been through the process more than once now, and I think it is worth explaining plainly what it actually involves, because the guidance from Companies House itself is not exactly written for people who just want the practical answer.
Why This Change Happened
For as long as I have been forming companies, which is well over a decade at this point, Companies House ran almost entirely on trust. You typed your name and address into a form, ticked a box confirming you were telling the truth, and that was that. Nobody checked. It made setting up a company genuinely fast, but it also made the register an easy place to hide behind a fake or stolen identity, which is exactly what a fair amount of fraud and money laundering activity relied on.
The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act gives Companies House real investigative powers for the first time, and identity verification is the foundation the rest of it sits on. It is hard to argue against the principle. A register that anyone can pollute with a fake name is not a useful register, and it has been an obvious weak point in UK corporate law for years.
Who Has To Verify And When
New directors appointed to a company now have to verify their identity as part of that appointment. Anyone forming a brand new company has to verify before incorporation completes. For directors of existing companies, the requirement is being phased in against each company's confirmation statement date, so you are not all being asked to do it on the same day, but every existing director will be brought into scope over the course of the rollout.
People with significant control, meaning anyone who owns more than a quarter of the shares or otherwise controls a company even without holding a formal director title, are caught by the same requirement. If you set up a company years ago and quietly hold a large shareholding without ever being listed as a director, do not assume this does not apply to you.
The Practical Process Itself
You can verify directly through GOV.UK using a passport or driving licence and the same facial matching technology used for other government identity checks, which for most people takes a few minutes on a phone. The alternative route is verification through an authorised corporate service provider, typically an accountant or formation agent, which is the option a lot of directors will end up using simply because their accountant already handles their company admin and can fold it into that relationship.
Once verified, you get a personal code that stays attached to your identity across every company you are involved with. You do not repeat the process for each directorship. That part of the design is genuinely sensible, and if you hold multiple appointments the way I do, it means the pain is front loaded rather than repeated.
What Happens If You Do Not Verify
This is the part that should focus minds. An unverified director cannot be validly appointed, and Companies House has the power to treat filings from unverified directors as invalid. In practice that means a company could find itself unable to properly file a confirmation statement or register a new director, which starts to look like the kind of administrative gridlock that genuinely disrupts a business rather than just annoying the person filling in the form.
Companies House has also confirmed there will eventually be criminal offences attached to acting as a director while deliberately unverified, in the same way there are already offences around filing false information. I do not expect this to be used against genuinely busy founders who are a few weeks late, but I would not want to be the test case either.
My Honest Take
I do not have a problem with the principle here. I have written before about how UK small business policy tends to talk tough while quietly making founders' lives harder, and for once this is a reform where the reasoning genuinely holds up. A public register that anyone can populate with a false identity is not fit for purpose, and cleaning that up benefits every legitimate business owner whose name sits next to fraudulent ones on the same register.
What I do think is being underplayed is how this lands on people who, like me, hold several appointments and have to keep track of verification status, confirmation statement dates and compliance windows across more than one company. It is not difficult individually, but the cognitive load of yet another compliance task sitting alongside payroll, tax and the actual job of running the business adds up. Companies House does not seem to have thought hard about founders juggling multiple entities, which is a more common situation than the guidance suggests it expects.
What To Actually Do About It
Do not wait for your confirmation statement date to force the issue. Verify now, using the GOV.UK route if you are comfortable with it, because it takes minutes and removes the risk of a filing being rejected later because you left it too late. If you hold multiple directorships, verify once and then check each company's specific compliance deadline separately, because the personal code does not exempt individual companies from their own filing requirements.
If you run several businesses or hold non executive positions the way I do, this is exactly the kind of administrative overhead that is worth building a proper checklist for rather than tackling reactively each time a deadline appears. It is the same discipline around getting the boring operational basics sorted before they become a genuine problem that I write about in The 28 Day Startup. Get it done early, keep a note of your personal code somewhere sensible, and this becomes a five minute annoyance rather than a genuine risk to how your company operates.
