Member Article

How a networking firm in Whitechapel helped bring Companies House into the 21st Century

The UK’s historic registrar of companies, Companies House, dates its history back to the 19th Century when the Joint Stock Companies Act of 1844 dictated that all companies created in the UK were required to be recorded on a central register.

Since then, every company registration in England and Wales (and Scotland since 1856) has been added to Companies House records, first from its base on Chancery Lane and then from 1976 at its Cardiff headquarters.

The very creation of the Companies House registrar was itself a democratising development, opening up company creation to the wider public after the process had hitherto only been possible via royal decree.

Now the organisation, which currently employs 1000 people, has embarked on a massive digital democratisation drive and possibly the biggest revolution in the way it operates since its foundation, after it committed to making its digital database of 170m records on UK companies and directors available to anyone.

Its vow to ‘establish a truly open register of business information’ has the potential to further cement the UK as a FinTech hub and improve transparency across the country’s businesses, but the digitisation effort has also entailed an enormous amount of work.

To facilitate the delivery of its digital services, Companies House has embarked on a significant procurement drive in the past few years to help digitise its data and strengthen its network for the rigours of the 21st Century.

One of the few SMEs to secure a tendering contract as part of the project was London’s HighSpeed Office Ltd (hSo), who helped plan and develop Companies House’s network linking its main office in the Welsh capital to its four other offices in London, Edinburgh, Belfast and Newport.

The Whitechapel-based network and telephony firm was appointed to the Network Services Framework to upgrade the agency’s network, which is integrated with Amazon AWS public cloud, whilst ensuring that digital data transfer across Companies House remained as secure as possible.

Chris Evans, Managing Director of hSo described Companies House as a ‘leader’ in the public sector provision of digital services, but that their network was in need of an upgrade in order to support the ‘vast amount’ of traffic they receive everyday.

Following the completion of the network upgrade, Steve Pitt, Head of Procurement at Companies House said: “hSo understood our challenges and have worked with us to implement a robust and resilient dual-carrier Wide Area Network (WAN) solution that can cope with increasing capacity demand whilst ensuring the data is completely secure.”

The project now means that the agency’s network infrastructure is better equipped to deal with the increasing volumes of traffic the service, which launched its beta version back in June 2015, will inevitably attract as the Companies House digital revolution continues.

Whether that’s entrepreneurs plugging vanity searches into the agency’s database, the historically curious rattling off searches for the oldest registered companies still extant in the UK (for the record, it’s the Ashford Cattle Market Company Ltd which was incorporated all the way back in 25 September 1856) or an investor carrying out due diligence on a potential portfolio company, the service is set to become an invaluable tool for the UK business community as a whole.

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