Further to my previous news regarding the impending closure of CHD and WebCheck, I have now received a further update regarding some significant enhancements to CHS (Companies House Service), sourced from a senior executive at Companies House.

You will note that Companies House continue with their welcome stance of not setting a date for the closure of CHD and WebCheck.

We have been asked by Companies House to provide further consultancy regarding the functionality of CHS, which we hope will result in satisfactory platform that users will embrace.   The update from Companies House is as follows:

Latest enhancements to CHS:

  • We have further extended the Dissolved Search functionality to include the ability to order a company report containing filing history and details of officers. Next step is to expose the API and link to the service from the main search pages – probably in the next few weeks.
  • Having added >40k Pre95M image sets to CHS, we have now started on the Pre95 image sets. This is slow going but we’ve added around 40k so far and expect to add over 100k in total. This is likely to take us to mid-November.
  • We’ve made some improvements to the Certs & Copies ordering which should reduce some of the intermittent errors we’ve been seeing and we’ve been able to maintain a 2-3 day average turnaround for orders. Currently working on improving the journey for orders relating to LP and LLPs.
  • Also working on Enhanced Search & Reporting functionality on CHS that will allow users to search for sets of companies that match various, flexible search criteria such as status, location, date range of incorporation or dissolution, Standard Industrial Classification codes etc. This will be released iteratively, gradually building up the search criteria that can be used.

With respect to the closure of CH Direct we have not set a new date for that yet as company registrations online would rather maintain focus on getting to a point where our customers are more comfortable with that closure. Any new date will be preceded by a notice period so, since we are now in October, I think it would be safe to conclude it is not happening this year.

I will provide a further update as and when any new information emerges from Companies House sources.

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