Dissolved Companies 2016 Onwards

#1

HI,

Help pls

Before I spend time testing and coding, will I be able to use the API to bring back a list of company numbers that have been Dissolved from 2016 onwards?

thanks

#2

If you mean “can I use the API to search for all companies dissolved from 2016 onwards and return their numbers?” then (unless CH have added a new advanced search to the API) the answer would seem to be no. See search docs:

See also about experimental “address search”: For search/companies query - what does it search and how

The API is designed for searching by name (fuzzy search) or number. Of course it will return information on company status for all companies your search finds and if and when they ceased.

If you want to find all companies which were dissolved from 2016 onwards and only need to get this data once, or updating it monthly, you could use the downloadable data product:

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

This is a monthly snapshot in CSV of current company data.
The data format is documented at the link (rather basic).
The fields of interest to screen out dissolved companies would be:

  • CompanyStatus - the actual current status.
  • Dissolution Date - note that companies which have been reinstated may still have their old dissolution date (see Active companies with date of cessation).

If you were just wondering whether dissolved / ceased companies were reported on, the answer is “yes” if they ceased up to 6 years ago. See:

Specific information is in the change note:

“Dissolved company names. Dissolved company names are now considered, but are given less significance than equivalently matching active company names. The last six years of dissolved companies will be available.”
And
“…but unless you are pretty closely matching the dissolved company name, it will be ranked less important than an active company, as a decay function of it’s dissolution date.”

#3

Hi all,

I am looking to bulk download all the dissolved companies. Will that be possible using API request? I am worried about the performance of the API request as there is limit in the number of requests that can be made. Also, is there any difference between the data downloaded from the free company house data Companies House and what we get through API request?

#4

Companies House have repeatedly said that they don’t expect people to just use the API to download large chunks of their dataset. So doing this using the bulk data products would seem to be more appropriate. You’re correct - there are differences in the data you get back and you get less information from the bulk data. What you get may be appropriate for your use case though - see the format here:

Compare that with the Company Profile endpoint.

You could locate all the dissolved company numbers using the bulk data and then request more information on ones you want using the Company Profile endpoint of course.

There are two other possible ways:

In theory you could use the Advanced Search endpoint to find only dissolved companies. However there is a fixed limit on this search (10000 results currently):

So you couldn’t just retrieve all the dissolved companies by issuing one call - and then paging the dataset - anyway. Possibly one way would be to work through date ranges e.g. setting dissolved_from and dissolved_to appropriately, and narrowing the range if the number of results reported was over 10000.

EDIT - there is also the Dissolved Companies search endpoint. However this searches by name and appears to be limited to 100 results at a time so likely isn’t so helpful for you.

Note: I’m not from Companies House.

#5

Hi ,

Thanks for your reply. We do have the bulk data downloaded from Company house website - the monthly snapshot. It doesn’t have any companies with dissolved status. When I search for the companies with status as Active - proposal to strike off in Company search API endpoint, some companies are already in dissolved status. The question is why it is not getting updated in the Company House free data download - Companies House

#6

Ah - neither of us read the first line of the Companies House download page:

The Free Company Data Product is a downloadable data snapshot containing basic company data of live companies on the register.

So I’m guessing while you can find other status codes you won’t find “Dissolved” (or “DISSOLVED” or “Converted/Closed” etc.). That’s just a guess though!

As to why things are different when you check (why the list is not getting updated) you’ve already noted that this is a monthly snapshot. So it will be “out of date” when published and will only get more out of date.

Again it really depends on what your overall goal is here.

Possible ideas:

  • There are some groups or third-party companies who may have this data. That may cost you. Statbooks are one (I’m not associated with them and have no idea if they can do this for you). Search this forum / google to find others.
  • Ask Companies House if they have this data or can extract it for you.
  • Possibly try the Advanced Search idea with dates I suggested above. I’ve not tried this myself so no guarantee it’ll work or that it’s a particularly good way to do this. Also it will be up to you to keep below the rate limit and obviously this will take time!

I think this is less simple because Companies House data and APIs are really set up to allow you to search for a particular thing (or limited range of things) - so e.g. “I have a company name / number - is it dissolved?” or “what is the status of company x?”.

Good luck.

#7

Yes, Statbooks have and can supply Dissolved Companies data. Just contact admin@statbooks.co.uk with your requirements.