Country_of_Residence

Hi there

Can someone advise on the Country_of_Residence data returned in the API please ?

Is this populated for all directors/PSC’s ? If not, what % of the data base is populated ?

Welcome! I have no idea of the answer (I’m just another API user). All I can tell you is that the Companies House data set is generally not validated and it’s almost entirely dependent on those submitting to put in the correct data in the correct places (or put in data at all). So it’s likely that this will be incomplete. Also although there exists a government list of countries it’s quite possible that you may find data which doesn’t match that. Apart from anything else the Companies House data set is old enough that countries have changed over the course of its operation!

So it’s likely you’ll need to find this for yourself. However you can do this simply - at the cost of a bit of processing power / signing up for extra data. There are actually 2 datasets you’ll need and they’re obtained in different ways. The simplest is the PSC dataset. You can get the PSC dataset as a bulk download here:

http://download.companieshouse.gov.uk/en_pscdata.html

This is in json format and if I recall follows a similar (if not the same) format as the Companies House Public Data API (for detail see e.g. the PSC List data format spec). It sounds like you’re just interested in individuals - so use the kind member to identify these. There are 3 kinds of PSC - actually 4 because there’s a “super-secure” one which means “there is one but we’re not telling you anything about them”. So this can have values individual-person-with-significant-control, corporate-entity-person-with-significant-control, legal-person-with-significant-control or super-secure-person-with-significant-control.

For individuals (and I think Legal Persons?) the following members of the object relate to country / nationality:
country_of_residence, nationality

If you did need to look into entities then you’d want the identification sub-object and the country_registered and possibly place_registered. I am not sure that these are constrained to take particular values (not that most of the Companies House data set is…) so parsing would be advised.

For directors you’ll want the Officers dataset. You have to sign up for that - post a request to the following thread:

(If no-one notices that for a week or so then try an individual post with the same request).

The officers dataset (see the Officers List endpoint spec) is similar to the PSC one but not quite the same. (I think the PSC one came second and was modelled on Officers). Field names like the PSC ones and there is a kind member here too but that’s not useful - if you want to filter for e.g. directors you’ll need the officer_role member.

Good luck.