Welcome to the wide world of entries in Companies House data! As well as the more “usual” companies you’ll also find some other types of entities. Many of these do not adhere to the “standard specification” exactly - or rather you may find things vary here. For starters the example you have - this is of type charitable-incorporated-organisation
(company numbers start with “CE”). These are charities and this is an example of “data from elsewhere” that Companies House provides. If you look one of these up (via website or API) you’ll seen some indicators that these are “registered elsewhere” and/or that only “partial data is available”.
(In the case of querying the Company Profile endpoint for one of these you appear currently to get a date_of_creation
but it will be an empty string - so the Company Profile API docs - if not the Advanced Search ones - are “correct” about there being a field, just not about the contents…).
More detail on this below. Before that - to answer your second question - this depends on exactly what you want to find out. I don’t know that you can directly query “no date of creation” via Advanced Search. However you can do so indirectly by listing all the company types which don’t have one! That’s why I asked what you wanted to find out. So this doesn’t necessarily guarantee you will find all entries without a date, OR that every item won’t have one. However if your purpose was just to investigate this set further then requesting something like the following should do it:
https://api.company-information.service.gov.uk/advanced-search/companies?company_type=assurance-company&company_type=charitable-incorporated-organisation&company_type=industrial-and-provident-society&company_type=investment-company-with-variable-capital&company_type=icvc-securities&company_type=icvc-warrant&company_type=icvc-umbrella&company_type=registered-society-non-jurisdictional&company_type=royal-charter&company_type=scottish-charitable-incorporated-organisation&company_type=unregistered-company
(Note that there’s no shortcut for ICVC companies; you have to list each type. The website allows you to group these!)
(You can do this via the website also)
So for different types you’ll find slightly different sets of data may be available. In general, but especially here - it is sensible to treat everything from Companies House with caution and parse / validate. (It’s good practice to do this with data from ANY external source of course!) So I would not depend on fields being returned, or the type of data within them, or particular values - without further checking.
So below is a (partial as I’ve not got all data to hand) list of the types which don’t appear to have date_of_creation
, their initial letters in the company code. Many of these do not have much other data either since Companies House isn’t the main registrar. For some you may find a field in the Company Profile resource - partial_data_available
- referencing text suggesting where more information is held. (You’ll need to look that text up in the “enum constants” mentioned next). You can see a list of the type constant at the Companies House “enum constants” collection - the main “constants” file.
Further detail is that some entries which might be expected to have less data e.g. Protected Cell companies and Registered Overseas Entities do seem to have date_of_creation
.
Charities (note - do not depend on every charity being listed here either - refer to their respective registers!)
CE - charitable-incorporated-organisation
CS - scottish-charitable-incorporated-organisation
Bodies regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority:
AC - assurance-company
SA - assurance-company (Scotland)
IP - industrial-and-provident-society
SP - industrial-and-provident-society (Scotland)
NP - industrial-and-provident-society (Northern Ireland)
NO - industrial-and-provident-society
NI - industrial-and-provident-society
Royal Charter Companies and Registered Societies
RC - royal-charter
SR - royal-charter (Scotland)
RS - registered-society-non-jurisdictional
ICVCs - there are several types of these e.g. investment-company-with-variable-capital / icvc-umbrella icvc-securities / icvc-warrant
These have starting letters IC or SI for Scottish examples.
Unregistered Companies
ZC - unregistered-company
SZ - unregistered-company (Scotland)