Nearly one in eleven UK companies sitting on the active register carries a proposal-to-strike-off notice. That single number — buried inside 5.9 million company records — tells you more about the real state of British corporate activity than any headline figure from Companies House.
BORSCH.AI aggregates 50 million+ signals across 53 UK government data sources. Here’s what the full picture actually looks like.
The “Active” Label Is Doing a Lot of Heavy Lifting
The official Companies House register shows 5,904,809 total companies. Of those, 5,233,040 carry an “Active” status — which sounds reassuring until you drill into the sub-statuses sitting alongside it.
| Status | Count | % of Total |
|---|---|---|
| Active | 5,233,040 | 88.6% |
| Active – Proposal to Strike Off | 545,082 | 9.2% |
| Liquidation | 119,425 | 2.0% |
| In Administration | 3,546 | 0.06% |
| Receiver Manager on at least one charge | 2,090 | 0.04% |
| In Administration/Administrative Receiver | 614 | 0.01% |
| Voluntary Arrangement | 543 | <0.01% |
| Receivership | 181 | <0.01% |
| Administration Order | 122 | <0.01% |
| Administrative Receiver | 106 | <0.01% |
Add up everything outside the pure “Active” bucket and you get 671,709 companies — 11.4% of the total register — that are either winding down, in formal insolvency proceedings, or already flagged for removal. That’s larger than the entire registered company population of most European countries.
The “Active – Proposal to Strike Off” category is particularly instructive for due diligence. These are entities that Companies House has formally moved to remove — typically because they’ve stopped filing — yet they remain technically live. Any business relationship, credit check, or counterparty assessment based solely on “Active” status would miss all 545,082 of them.
Who Is Actually Filing Accounts?
Filing accounts is one of the clearest proxies for genuine trading activity. A company with nothing to report often files nothing at all. BORSCH.AI has ingested 6,074,386 Companies House XBRL account records — the machine-readable financial filings that contain balance sheet and income data.
Alongside that, the platform holds:
- 22,449,602 Companies House officer records
- 11,897,682 PSC (Persons with Significant Control) records
- 2,493,063 mortgage/charge records, covering 802,299 distinct companies with live registered charges
The mortgage data point is particularly telling. A company with an active registered charge has almost certainly conducted real economic activity — you don’t take on secured debt to sit dormant. 802,299 companies with mortgages represents roughly 13.6% of the total register, and these are disproportionately likely to be genuinely operational.
What the SIC Code Data Reveals
Of the 5.9 million companies on the register, 213,222 have supplied no SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) code whatsoever. That’s more than the entire population of Birmingham’s registered companies. No SIC code typically means the company was incorporated but never fully configured — another indicator of shell or dormant status.
Among companies that do have a classification, the distribution reveals a register dominated by property and professional services:
| SIC Code | Sector | Count |
|---|---|---|
| 68209 | Letting/operating own or leased real estate | 279,711 |
| 68100 | Buying and selling of own real estate | 255,277 |
| 70229 | Management consultancy (non-financial) | 228,516 |
| None supplied | — | 213,222 |
| 82990 | Other business support services | 194,777 |
| 47910 | Retail via internet/mail order | 176,071 |
| 62020 | IT consultancy | 138,301 |
| 96090 | Other service activities | 129,515 |
| 98000 | Residents’ property management | 126,888 |
| 41100 | Development of building projects | 123,494 |
Real estate alone — combining letting (68209) and buying/selling (68100) — accounts for 534,988 companies, or just over 9% of the entire register. Many of these are single-asset SPVs (Special Purpose Vehicles) set up to hold one property. Operationally active? Technically yes. Commercially trading in any conventional sense? Mostly no.
The 176,071 internet retail companies (SIC 47910) represent a more interesting cohort: these are businesses that, by definition, require a functioning online presence to operate. Yet this is a sector notorious for high churn, with many companies incorporated speculatively and never launching.
Geography: London’s Gravitational Pull Remains Extreme
| City/Region | Registered Companies |
|---|---|
| London | 1,155,104 |
| Manchester | 115,596 |
| Birmingham | 104,868 |
| Glasgow | 78,225 |
| Cardiff | 67,562 |
| Edinburgh | 61,144 |
| Bristol | 60,573 |
| Leeds | 56,786 |
| Liverpool | 51,394 |
| Nottingham | 48,425 |
London registers nearly 10 times more companies than Manchester, the second-ranked city. It accounts for roughly 19.6% of all companies in the top-15 regional breakdown. Harrow (32,087) and Ilford (31,754) — both outer London boroughs with large business communities — each individually outrank Coventry (31,392), a major UK city. This reflects both genuine commercial concentration and the well-documented pattern of using London addresses for incorporation purposes.
What Does “Actually Trading” Mean for Risk and Due Diligence?
The signal picture sharpens considerably when you look beyond the company register itself. BORSCH.AI’s 50,024,066 signals break down across categories that proxy for real operational activity:
| Signal Category | Signal Count |
|---|---|
| Governance (officers, PSC, filings) | 32,809,178 |
| Financial (accounts, charges) | 8,323,939 |
| Risk (insolvency, gazette, sanctions) | 3,854,151 |
| Compliance (ICO, FCA, AML registers) | 3,346,959 |
| Quality (food hygiene, CQC, Ofsted) | 639,706 |
| Trade (import/export, UKTI) | 405,220 |
| Innovation (UKRI grants, Innovate UK) | 253,616 |
A company appearing only in governance signals (incorporated, officers filed) but absent from financial, compliance, and trade signals is almost certainly dormant or minimal-activity. A company cross-referenced across trade data (399,244 UKTRADEINFO records), ICO registration (600,000 records), payment practices (388,425 reports), and food standards (380,551 records) is demonstrably engaged with the economy.
This multi-signal triangulation is what freely available Companies House data simply cannot provide. The register tells you a company exists. It cannot tell you whether it is buying, selling, employing, borrowing, exporting, or operating under any regulatory framework.
The Actionable Takeaway
If your due diligence, credit assessment, or partner screening relies on “Active” status as a proxy for trading activity, the data above should prompt a process review. At minimum, any serious assessment should cross-reference:
- Recent accounts filing — has the company submitted XBRL-format accounts in the last 18 months?
- Proposal-to-strike-off flag — automatically excluded by many automated checks, but requires explicit data sourcing
- Charge and mortgage data — 802,299 companies with live charges are more likely to be genuinely operational
- Regulatory register presence — ICO, FCA, CQC, and food standards registrations are hard evidence of ongoing operations
- Trade signals — import/export records, government contract appearances, and payment practice reports confirm commercial activity
The UK company register is the starting point, not the answer. With 545,082 companies nominally active but pending removal, and 213,222 more without even a sector classification, the gap between “registered” and “trading” is wider than most risk frameworks assume.
Explore the full signal picture for any UK company — including status flags, filing history, regulatory registrations, and trade data — at borsch.ai.
Disclaimers
Disclaimer: This article was generated with AI assistance using data from Borsch.AI’s aggregation of 53 UK government sources. While all statistics are derived from real data, analysis and interpretation are AI-generated and should be independently verified.
Disclaimer: Data presented reflects information available at the time of publication and may not reflect the most current state. Source data is aggregated from public government registers which may contain delays, errors, or omissions.
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