Some bad news announced this morning. Companies House have declared that effective from 1 May 2024, there is going to be an enormous increase to all of the administrative filing costs for UK companies. This comes on the back of a push from the UK government to heavily increase the admin involved in all company formation as a response to money laundering by large international corporations and criminal networks with new legislation in the form of The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act.
Further down the line we should all expect much more tight and burdensome controls and paperwork when attempting to form companies.
For some regular filing fees this is a 400% increase on existing fee levels. The most relevant increases are:
- Incorporation Fees from £10 to £50
- Confirmation Statement Filing from £13 to £34
- Name Change from £10 to £20
- Voluntary Strike Off from £8 to £33
The full schedule of new fees can be found here and compared to the existing fees here
In addition, there are further changes coming into force from the 4 March 2024:
Stricter rules on registered office addresses.
All companies must have an ‘appropriate address’ – this is now defined as one where
- any documents sent to the registered office should be expected to come to the attention of a person acting on behalf of the company
- any documents sent to that address can be recorded by an acknowledgement of delivery
Registered email addresses
All companies will now need to give a registered email address when they incorporate which will be used for all official communications. This will not be publicly available thankfully.
Statement of Lawful Purpose
All subscribers to a company will need to confirm that they’re forming the company for a lawful purpose. Rather an odd declaration as one imagines that anyone seeking to form a company for an unlawful purpose is unlikely to be discouraged by this!