Impact of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency reforms on academy trusts

The following changes, relevant to academy trusts, came into force on 4 March 2024:

Registrar’s powers: 

The registrar will have the power to query and, if necessary, remove information from the Companies House Register that appears to be inaccurate, incomplete, false or fraudulent more quickly, rather than needing to obtain a court order. 

You can also expect to see annotations on the register from Companies House that note any issues with information that has been provided. Academy trusts should continue to ensure any filing to Companies House are accurate and timely.

Enforcement and sanctions: 

Companies House has a range of sanctions for companies that do not respond to a formal request from Companies House for further information within 14 days, which could include:

• financial penalties; 

• annotations on the company’s records; and

• prosecution.

Academy trusts should ensure to adhere to Companies House deadlines for filings and any requests for further information. 

Confirmation statements: 

All academies will need to provide the following information with their Confirmation Statement:

• a registered email address for communications with Companies House (all companies incorporating after 4 March 2024 will also need to provide the email on incorporation); and

• confirmation that the future activities of the academy will be lawful.

Registered office:

Companies must, at all times, have an “appropriate address”, which is an address where:

• a document received on behalf of the company would be expected to come to the attention of a person acting on behalf of the company; and

• the document delivery can be recorded.

PO boxes cannot be used as a registered office address. As most academy trusts will use a school address as their registered office, this change is likely to have little impact in this context.

Companies House fees are increasing from 1 May 2024. This includes an increase to the cost of filing the confirmation statement to confirm the information held by Companies House is correct. From 1 May 2024, this will increase to £34 (for digital filing). 

Full details of the new fee structure can be found on the Companies House Website. 

• Identity verification: New identification verification procedures are being put in place, so anyone setting up, running, owning or controlling a academy in the UK will soon need to provide their ID. Persons acting on behalf of a company will also need to verify their ID before filing documents on behalf of the company.

• Protecting information: measures will be phased in enabling certain personal information to be supressed from the register in certain circumstances. 

• Accounts: Over the next few years there will be a phased transition to filing company accounts online only. The timing of this transition depends on what type of accounts the company files.

• Transparency of company ownership: Companies will be required to record the full names of members (individuals and corporate members) in their register of members. This is to increase corporate transparency, although in practice academy trusts already have a high level of transparency regarding their membership (given the additional filing obligations with the Department for Education on GIAS).

• Company books: some local registers (directors, secretaries, director’s residential addresses, PSCs) which are currently required to be included in the company’s statutory books will no longer be required, and will need to only be filed with Companies House. Companies will o no longer be able to elect to hold their member’ register at Companies House.

• A new criminal offence: failing to prevent fraud: The provisions of the Act would mean that an organisation would be liable where a specified fraud offence is committed by an employer or agent for the organisation’s benefit and the organisation did not have ‘reasonable’ fraud prevention procedures in place.

A series of helpful government factsheets are available, and a Companies House blogpost also gives more detail on which changes will be introduced first. 

The Act applies to both existing companies and new companies being incorporated, so existing academy trusts need to be aware of the changes, as should anyone wishing to establish a new academy trust or company associated with an academy trust (e.g. a trading subsidiary). 

If you have any queries on your company obligations as an academy trust, please contact your usual Stone King contact or grahamburns@stoneking.co.uk