Companies House identity verification for company directors has made confirmation statements pile up overdue, and some directors have discovered they are not keen on being seen
CARDIFF - Companies House asked directors for photo ID, confirmation statements went overdue, and somewhere between the camera and the form there may be tens of thousands of companies whose directors do not enjoy being seen. What's the deal with a directorship that works until somebody asks for a face.
How Companies House Identity Verification for Directors Works
The rule is not a secret. Since 18 November 2025, anyone appointed as a director or person with significant control of a UK company has to verify who they are, and existing directors must do it by the time their next confirmation statement is due, which can't be filed until every director has been checked. You can verify online through GOV.UK's identity verification guidance for Companies House, using a GOV.UK One Login account, or through an authorised corporate service provider, as Hawsons' accountancy guide sets out. The power comes from the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act, which you can find at legislation.gov.uk if you have a free afternoon and a difficult relationship with sleep.
For years you could be a director with a name, a date of birth, and a confidence. The name could be creative. The date of birth could be ambitious. Then the confidence was asked to stand against a wall and look at a lens. Some of the surge is admin. Admin is slow. Some of it is a person who has been a director of forty-one companies and a resident of none, asked to prove the face matches the hobby.
The Overdue Numbers Depend on Who Is Counting
Tens of thousands is the cautious estimate. Accountants who track the register have been posting much larger tallies of overdue verifications on AccountingWeb, running into hundreds of thousands of directors and, depending on how you count, above a million records including people with significant control. A lot of those sit on dormant or zombie companies that nobody has the energy to wind up, so they inflate the total without ever filing a thing. It is the corporate equivalent of a gym membership. The real number of live companies in trouble is smaller. It is also not zero, and it is not tidy.
Fraudulent directors are a business model with a registered office in a newsagent. The newsagent did not ask for a photograph. The newsagent asks if you want a receipt. Companies House wants a receipt with a head on it. The head, in a number of cases, has remembered a prior engagement. Honest directors are late too, because the form is long and the photo needs to look like a photo, not a man being arrested by his own laptop. The grumble is British for compliance. A company that cannot produce a face was, in some sense, already a rumour.
What Happens to a Director Who Doesn't Verify
Companies House has said that failing to verify is an offence, and the rules allow for disqualification of directors who don't comply, which is why the accountants are all sending the same reminder email. In practice the regulator has been slower with penalties than the warnings suggest, and accountants have wondered in public whether anything will actually happen to the ones who ignore the letters. The usual route to trouble is the confirmation statement. It can't go in until every director has a code, and a company that stops filing eventually gets a letter about being struck off, which is the register's way of closing the café. Directors based abroad have found the process especially fiddly, and several firms have suggested the practical fix is for the awkward director to resign and be reappointed once the paperwork clears, which is a lot like leaving a party so you can arrive properly.
Why Companies House Wants a Face on the Register
The point of the exercise is the Companies House register itself, which anybody can search for free and which lenders, suppliers and journalists treat as a source of truth. If a director is a made-up person, or a real person who has no idea, the register is a work of fiction with a filing fee. Verifying identity means one person, one code, across every company they run, so the man with forty-one companies finally has to be the same man in all of them.
Ghost companies bid, invoice, vanish, and leave the VAT with a man who thought he was buying a franchise. A photo will not stop all of it. A photo will stop the ones who can't borrow a face. That is a start. Starts are what regulators announce when the finish is a decade away. Tens of thousands is an estimate, not a charge sheet. Between them sits a button that says upload image. The button is patient. The button has all year. https://prat.uk/?p=51273
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