Non-existing SIC codes

Varin · December 17, 2023, 1:50am

Some companies do have SIC codes attached that don’t seem to exist:

Company number: 04293164
SIC codes reported: 7221, 7222

Can’t find those codes neither in your search nor in any other resources.

voracityemail · December 17, 2023, 4:01pm

Short: these codes are historic. (Further note - Companies House holds data going back over 100 years. So you will find some things have changed over that time! Not everything can be “remapped” either e.g. states, countries, addresses change etc.)

You won’t find them in e.g. the Companies House online SIC lookup:

https://resources.companieshouse.gov.uk/sic/

This is because new companies should use the new (5 digit) codes. These are old / historic codes and not to be used when making new filings. I believe this changed around 2016 e.g. after this company ceased trading (2011). See:

If you use the Companies House online Company information service for the company you will find there are descriptions given:

If you look in the “Enum Constants” - which is generally the first place to search for text to go with the values you may find in the Companies House API - you will find those SIC codes there also:

github.com

companieshouse/api-enumerations/blob/master/constants.yml

---
identification_type:
    'non-eea' : "Non European Economic Area"
    'eea' : "European Economic Area"
    'uk-limited-company' : "UK Limited Company"
    'other-corporate-body-or-firm' : "Other Corporate Body or Firm"
    'registered-overseas-entity-corporate-managing-officer' : "Corporate managing officer"
jurisdiction:
    'england-wales' : "England/Wales"
    'wales' : "Wales "
    'scotland' : "Scotland"
    'northern-ireland' : "Northern Ireland"
    'european-union' : "European Union"
    'united-kingdom' : "United Kingdom"
    'england' : "England"
    'noneu' : "Foreign (Non E.U.)"
company_summary:
    'other' : "Other"
    'private-unlimited' : "Private unlimited company"
    'ltd' : "Private limited Company"

This file has been truncated. show original

Hope this helps.

Varin · December 17, 2023, 6:52pm

Thanks for this, I had a feeling it’s something like this, yet I have not stumbled upon a list of the old codes anywhere. The list I imported to my app was from the Office of National Statistics, as I wanted the hierarchy and extra details.

Thanks for the link to the constants file, I didn’t really look into this repo, I will probably extract the old codes from there for the purpose of Advanced Search UI I’m building, but if you have a link to any resource that would show me the old codes in a hierarchy (if it was also a tier system like the new codes: Section->Division->Group->Class->SubClass) then I’d be very grateful.

voracityemail · December 17, 2023, 9:10pm

I believe some googling may find you more info on the old codes, it’s not something I have handy.

As regards the “enum constants” as Companies House call them, they are (often) referenced from the docs. I see the SIC codes are not though in the case of the Advanced Search list of companies or indeed the Company Profile resource.

Looking through the docs you will see links to many of these however - there are several “enum constants” documents.

It is the case that not all the values returned by the API which can be looked up in the enum constants are mentioned in the documentation. And vice-versa - some “constants” used by the API are nowhere mentioned in the enum constants. It can be the case that the documentation is not entirely complete or (in some places) correct. Searching on this forum is a good place to start!

mh.hunt · December 18, 2023, 12:21am

Hello @Varin This link may help you;
https://www.ons.gov.uk/methodology/classificationsandstandards/ukstandardindustrialclassificationofeconomicactivities/uksic2007

This document on that above link (an Excel extract) may be useful as a starting point;
Correlation between UK SIC 2003 and UK SIC 2007
(http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide-method/classifications/current-standard-classifications/standard-industrial-classification/correlation-between-uk-sic-2003-and-2007.xls)

Hope it helps.