At Companies House, every single person contributes to the understanding of how we work as an organisation. From every piece of post we open, to each form we process, from the diversity of our workforce to the number of sick days we report.

When we bring together all these puzzle pieces, we build a rich, informative picture of:

our workforce

our performance

our opportunities to celebrate success

our opportunities to strive

When the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic hit, the importance of Companies House data really came under the spotlight.

Overnight we moved to daily updates of information, pulling together millions of data points into an easily interpreted display.

In turn, this allowed our Executive Team and our management teams to make crucial decisions based on this easy to interpret information. Like how well our people are coping through this challenging time, and what we might need to do or provide to keep our people safe and well.

By using the data, our organisation made sure the support was appropriate, timely and we were able to measure the impact of what we were doing.

We have also been monitoring workload volumes far more regularly in order to inform our workload forecasting. This helps our Finance colleagues project the organisation’s income levels, which I’m sure you can imagine has been significantly challenging at this time.

Integrating this data into dashboards allows us to react quickly to any changing trends and can provide valuable insight. For example, we have been using innovative visualisations to monitor volumes by sector and UK region to give us a clearer understanding of what is currently driving company behaviour.

Of course, equally as important as our people and our workload, are the companies on our register. The next big effort was to better understand what this turbulent time might mean for them.

During this time, it has been imperative for the government to understand how businesses were coping during the pandemic and whether there were increases in businesses going under. This was because they were launching lots of business support measures – which you will have seen on the news.

Companies House has been providing data to a range of government partners which is being used to inform key policy decisions. Providing this data on a daily basis required us to transform the way we extract and collate data to create a fully automated data pipeline, which has been shared across government daily since April.

Thanks to our fantastic networks with the Office for National Statistics (ONS), you can now see some of this data for yourself in their Faster Indicators publication, which has enabled us to reach an even wider audience and increase the value of Companies House data.

All of this work demonstrates the value of the data on our register and how it helps us to build trust among our customers, which in turn helps drive confidence in the UK economy.

We want to hear your views on new powers for Companies House to query, remove and amend information on the public register.

Tell us what you think by responding to the consultation by 3 February  https://bit.ly/38eeve6