On 19 February, two regulations were passed: the Registrar of Companies (Fees) (Amendment) Regulations 2024 and the Registrar of Companies (Fees) (Register of Overseas Entities) Regulations 2024. The effect of these regulations is to amend various fees charged by Companies House and introduce new ones, largely in light of the expanded role played by the registrar under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 (ECCTA). The fee increases will be taking effect from 1 May 2024 and affect both the general functions performed by Companies House and the fees chargeable in respect of the Register of Overseas Entities (ROE). You can find the list of updated fees provided by Companies House here.

This fees increase was foreshadowed by Companies House in the Chief Executive and Registrar’s blog post back in October 2023 and has been widely understood as a means to fund its enhanced powers of investigation and enforcement given by the ECCTA. For instance, Companies House recently announced that it has already spent 24,000 hours training 730 colleagues to ensure it has the capacity to utilise its new powers. With that backdrop, the increases to fees are mostly relatively modest although some will be more than doubling. The biggest proportionate increases are largely around the costs for incorporating or registering entities, for instance:

•  incorporating a company or LLP online will jump from £10 to £50;
• registering a UK establishment of an overseas company is going up from £20 to £71; and
• registering an overseas entity on the ROE is increasing from £100 to £234.

There will also be a significant uplift to fees charged for same day services, with the cost of a same-day reduction of share capital going from £50 to £136.

These regulations also serve as a helpful reminder that the provisions of the ECCTA are coming into force in stages. We are likely to see the rate at which secondary legislation is produced ramping up, especially with recent announcements that a number of the new Companies House powers will be effective on or after 4 March 2024.