Companies House wants the latest Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act report to be read as proof that the register is being cleaned up. In its 11 June 2026 news release, the agency said the third progress report recorded nearly 4 million people verifying their identities since compulsory checks began in November 2025, 151,000 company addresses removed since March 2024, and millions of pounds in suspected criminal proceeds seized with partner agencies. (gov.uk) For creditors, suppliers and employees, this is not a tidy piece of registry administration. Companies House itself says the register informs everyday credit and purchasing decisions; the obvious inference is that false addresses, sham appointments and hijacked identities can distort the decisions people make before money is lost. (gov.uk)
That is the real shift behind the ECCT Act. The Registrar is no longer meant to sit back and file whatever arrives. Government factsheets say the Act gave Companies House new objectives to protect the integrity of the register, along with powers to query filings, require information and share data for crime prevention. Andy King’s language about moving away from a passive register is therefore more than branding; it reflects a legal change that started on 4 March 2024. (gov.uk) But the headline number on identity checks still needs context. Companies House’s own transition plan said more than 7 million individuals would eventually need to pass through verification, while existing directors and people with significant control were given a 12-month transition period tied to their confirmation statements. Compulsory identity verification began on 18 November 2025, after authorised corporate service providers were allowed to register from 18 March 2025. On that measure, nearly 4 million verifications look substantial, but plainly not the end of the exercise. (gov.uk)
The 151,000-address figure is striking, but the official announcement gives little texture behind it. The 11 June release says the removals protect innocent people from identity hijacking, yet it does not set out how many cases involved deliberate abuse, how many were repeat offenders, or how many had already been used to front suspect trading activity. The same problem appears in the claim that joint working has seized millions in suspected criminal proceeds: the release states the headline, but not the sum or the cases behind it. (gov.uk) That does not mean the clean-up is cosmetic. It does mean outsiders are being asked to accept progress largely on the agencies’ own framing. For a regime sold on transparency, that leaves a basic accountability question: how many bad filings are being stopped early enough to protect creditors, rather than removed only after the damage is done? The official news release does not answer that. (gov.uk)
Duncan Beach, chief executive of the Insolvency Service, framed the register clean-up as central to the agency’s enforcement strategy and said the Act had supplied more than 100 offences to work with. That is consistent with the Insolvency Service’s own 2026 to 2031 investigations and enforcement strategy, published on 16 July 2025, which names insolvency enforcement, Companies Act enforcement and tackling economic crime through companies as its three stated objectives. (gov.uk) More important for those owed money is what the statute lets regulators do with bad data once they find it. Government factsheets say the regime now allows the Registrar to impose financial penalties as an alternative to criminal prosecution, and those penalties can also feed into director disqualification. In practice, a system that can move quickly to fine, annotate and disqualify may matter more than ministerial talk about reform. (gov.uk)
There are signs that joint working is producing cases rather than just dashboards. On 9 June 2026, two days before the latest Companies House announcement, the Insolvency Service said five companies had been shut down this year after referrals linked to abuse of the UK register. The agency said those firms had registered more than 12,000 businesses in the UK, mostly for China-based clients, and that UK Sinosia Business Limited and Longshine Overseas Limited alone had registered more than 4,300 UK addresses before they were wound up at the High Court on 2 June 2026. (gov.uk) Last year’s second ECCT progress report showed the same pattern in earlier form. It described a suspicious address case in which the Insolvency Service intelligence team found 1,984 entities at one location after a Companies House referral, and a cloned-company operation in which 965 companies and 2,895 fraudulent appointments were removed from the register. Those are the sort of outcomes creditors will watch for, because they show whether suspicious filings are being converted into live enforcement rather than left to sit on the register. (assets.publishing.service.gov.uk)
The third progress report covers 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026 and was presented to Parliament under section 213(1) of the Act, with annual reports due until 2030. Companies House says the next phase includes more identity verification, greater transparency for the Register of Overseas Entities and a more intelligence-led enforcement model. (gov.uk) That leaves this story in a halfway position. The register is no longer being defended as a passive filing cabinet, and the early casework suggests the new powers can bite. But Inside Corporate Insolvency readers are entitled to ask for harder measures next: how many penalties, how many disqualifications, how many repeat offenders removed, and how quickly suspect filings are stopped before creditors, staff and counterparties are exposed. Until that data is laid out plainly, the official claim of a cleaner register deserves scrutiny, not applause. (gov.uk)