The CRF Innovation Awards celebrate the spirit of innovation and honours CRF jurisdictions which have successfully put in place world-class initiatives, as well as those which have creatively implemented customised solutions, to make a real difference to their stakeholders. There are two categories of awards: CRF Innovation Award (Excellence) and CRF Innovation Award (Commendation).

1. Driving confidence in the UK economy
UK Companies House:
Response to the
COVID-19 pandemic
Corporate Registers Forum
March 2021

2. What we are going to cover?
• Brief background to UK Companies House
• The challenge we faced
• Our response
• A case study – 'Upload a document' service
• The future

3. UK Companies House
• An Executive Agency within the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
(BEIS), UK Government
• Our role is to maintain a register of companies in the UK – allowing companies to:
• create a company (company incorporations),
• maintain a company (companies fulfilling their filing obligations throughout the life of the
company, at least annual accounts and confirmation statement, plus any other changes)
• close a company when it is no longer needed
• making this information available to the public

4. Accepted
Incorporated
12.2m
665,495
document
s
companies
Last year we...

5. We have …
And the Register was searched
4.35m
9.5bn
companies
on the
register
times in 2020

6. March
2020

7. The challenge we faced
• Operational colleagues were all office-based (600 of them!)
• 600 + different form types
• 83 end-to-end digital service – accounting for the majority of filings by volume (10.7 million)
with high digital take-up (85%+).
• The remaining 500+ were paper only (>1 million)
o reliant on post, cheques, CH staff in the office, etc.
o digital enablement planned for some but still in development / planning

8. Our response
Set up a taskforce with the aims of:
 safeguarding colleagues – enabling as many people as possible to work from home; and
 supporting customers to utilise alternative channels of submission and payment (not paper).
The approach we took involved:
- Daily meetings, cross-professions (Ops, Digital, Policy, Comms, etc)
- Fast-paced decision making and agile delivery
Digital channels were used heavily during this period and continue to be the channel of choice for
users.
Paper-only routes were the challenge … we did a number of things but going to focus on one

9. A case study - ‘Upload a document’ service
Aim:
- To enable more colleagues to work from home
- To enable customers to be able to submit documents without the need for paper (printing or post)
How?
Undertook a very short Discovery phase due to emergency nature - identified the problem, the existing
process, users and their needs.
Considered a number of options:
• Email solution (allow users to send emails with form attached) – volumes and different form types were
problematic, no confirmation of receipt (users need an audit trail), increased risk of entering data for wrong company or missing filings,
not end-to-end (did not integrate with internal service), security implications with forms containing personal data.
• Full digital journey with data input - would take too long to digitally enable 100s of forms in an emergency situation.
• A simple upload facility - users select form type, correct company details and integrates with existing Companies House
components.

10. The service
• Users can select the form type they want to submit to Companies House
• Sign in using their email address and password (and company authentication code, where appropriate)
• Browse their files to upload the document
• Receive email confirmation of receipt and then acceptance/rejection
Internal process...
• The service is fully integrated with our ‘front end scanning’ solution and automatically directed to the
correct document processing team for processing at home.
• Cutting out the need for manual postage receipt, sort and scanning.

11. First release of ‘Upload a document to
Companies House’
• The very first release for Upload a document
was a one-page service
• It had basic functions, asking for the company
number, upload type and to upload the
completed document
• It met the goal of allowing the user to carry on
with their job whilst in lockdown because of
COVID-19

12. Latest version of ‘Upload a document
to Companies House’
• 20+ releases – continually iterating service
based on user feedback and business
need
• 400 form types can now be uploaded
• Receiving 4,000 submissions per week
https://find-and-update.company-
information.service.gov.uk/efs-submission/start

13. Customer comments
"This is what I'm excited about. This will
be a game changer for us - uploading
stuff online with Companies House will
be amazing."
“Really easy to do, wish more
processes were like this!”
“I hope this service will be
continued and expanded
for all forms that can't be
filed electronically.”
“Very much preferred to having
to mail in a hard copy”
“You have no idea how I've been
longing for this”
“Very easy to submit documents.
Instructions are very clear too”

14. Conclusions and the future​
We have:
• Supported colleagues to be safe whilst maintaining customer services
• Enabled 400+ form types for 'Upload a document’
• Maintained customer satisfaction at 86%+ throughout
• Reviewed and adapted our roadmap for ongoing transformation and development of digital services
• Learned lessons on how to be more agile and deliver more – involving customers and our people to get
the best outcome
Next steps:
Continue to evaluate and iterate the services we’ve provided - some will be temporary, a number we are
considering as longer-term solutions
Implement the lessons learned as part of our ongoing Transformation programme