Company address formatting/issues

Hello,

I keep noticing company addresses that are obviously incorrect. eg:

or

How is this happening? Is there something in the registration process that is confusing people or is it on CH’s side? I haven’t gone through the registration process myself but I can’t see how a director can enter their company address so incorrectly as above.

Companies House have previously stated (on forum) that they don’t validate, they just record what they get.

These two were both electronic filings, 11453238 by an agent on behalf of company, 11458086 directly. What’s gone wrong isn’t exactly the same, plus in 11453238 (looking at the inital filing on the filing history) more than one address is incorrect (although it’s the same address). As you say, could be down to the submitter, the form, the process, or the API… ( I suspect “Lanchashire” is not the fault of CH however…)

For reference:

11453238
“registered_office_address”: {
“address_line_1”:“Unit 61, Mint Court Unit 61, Mint Court, Mint Drive”,
“address_line_2”:“Unit 61, Mint Court, Mint Drive”,
“locality”:“Birmingham”,
“region”:“West Midlands”,
“postal_code”:“B16 6EA”,
“country”:“England”
}

11458086
“registered_office_address” {
“address_line_1”:“Apartment 4, 1 B Britannia Road, Sale, Manchester Apartment 4, 1 B Britannia Road”,
“address_line_2”:“Sale”,
“locality”:“Manchester”,“region”:“Lanchashire”,
“postal_code”:“M33 2NX”,
“country”:“United Kingdom”
}

voracityemail’'s opening statement is exactly right and not just on this forum… We validate addresses for new incorporations and changes to existing data daily against Royal Mail PAF and around 7% pass through without change and a further 21% are semi-cosmetic changes (de-duplication well illustrated above and PAF also hates commas!!). The remainder are subject to fundamental changes - just to illustrate

11453238 above should look like

Apartment 61
Block 3
Mint Drive
Hockley
BIRMINGHAM
B18 6EA

whilst the registered postcode actually relates to a specific PO Box Number elsewhere .

11458086 above is a little better although Manchester is not the post town in this instance and the county, however spelt, is irrelevant.

Apartment 4
1B Britannia Road
SALE
M33 2NX

That said, we have what we have and it will not change unless the statute is amended.

Thanks to both of you for the responses. It’s seems a shame you don’t use a postcode look-up during registration to stop this from happening; I’m sure there’s a reason why that’s a bad idea though…

I can write logic to fix obvious duplication errors but there always seems to be some that slip through the net and probably lots more that I don’t see/check.

FYI - @frank and I are not from CH.

Frank’s right, the ultimate (expensive) solution is always going to be:

I can’t recall where but if you search around the forum you’ll find CH stating that they’re bound to record what they’re given (I’m not quite certain if / what the limits are to that). Recently they have stated that they may be requiring a degree of standardisation for new submissions if only for country / nationality (Countries and Nationalities not in ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code - #2 by ash):

Agreed. From our experience a postcode look up / field population capability would make a huge difference. It is clear that many who register new, or change, addresses do not understand what data should go in each field and then cannot correctly enter either the name of their employer (Care of Name) or the building in which they work everyday!

Keep in mind electronic company formation and form submission essentially emulates existing paper forms that are still in use. Even if CH had some kind of look-up and stricter formatting on their site, it would be difficult to enforce it elsewhere or validate it beyond absolute basics at time of incorporation. And while it’s not an issue for the Registered Office address, other addresses in these forms need to be able to account for international and potentially non-standard addresses.

One thing I find interesting is the mention of “semi-cosmetic” changes. There is definitely a cosmetic element to registered office addresses for some people, as they need to be displayed in on company stationary and the like. We have clients who want format their registered office address in a specific way and as long as mail will get to them to them at that address there is no requirement the address needs to be validated against Royal Mail PAF or in a standard format.

There would be loads a few other issues with using the PAF database as well, currency (both older and newer addresses that aren’t in the current database) and accuracy being the big ones.

Mostly just thinking out loud here, I find the discrepancies in how CH data is viewed from the perspectives of stauatory and legal requirements, CH’s role and responsbilities in holding that data and our desire for neat, usable data as developers/service providers far more interesting than I probably should!