Companies House has announced in a blog post that various provisions of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 (ECCTA), which received Royal Assent in October 2023, will be brought into force in March 2024.
The ECCTA contains, among other things, amendments to the Companies Act 2006 to facilitate the reform of Companies House and measures to increase transparency in relation to entities registered in the UK. The changes being introduced by the ECCTA are being implemented in phases – for more detail on the ECCTA, see our blog post and series of snapshots available here.
The provisions coming into force in March 2024 include:
- enhanced powers for Companies House to query and reject information submitted to it for filing, and in certain situations to remove information previously filed;
- new requirements for companies to provide Companies House with a registered email address and to ensure that their registered office is at an "appropriate" address (which cannot be a PO Box address); and
- a requirement for companies to include a "lawful purposes" statement, confirming that the company's intended future activities are lawful, in annual confirmation statements from March 2024 onwards.
The draft regulations that will bring these provisions into force have not been published so their precise commencement date is not yet known.
The changes made by the ECCTA to the so-called "identification" principle (by which a company may be criminally liable for certain economic crime offences committed by their senior managers) came into force on 26 December 2023.
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