PSC kinds - examples and corporate PSC numbers

#1

It seems (though not yet in specification documents) that the Persons with Significant Control list resource returns a “kind” field which indicates what type of entity the entry represents. This is very useful for us and this post is a note for others as isn’t yet fully documented. Also the relevant constants don’t yet appear in the constants files.

The values of “kind” would logically seem to be as indicated in the individual resources
for each type of entity:

…except that they aren’t quite.

There are some PSC data examples linked from a forum page (if they’re correct).
Examples of companies with PSCs:
00305979, 01047315, 04836674, 07470140, 09145694, 10259080, NI642135

From the data above:

  • Individual: ‘individual-person-with-significant-control’ - appears this way in data.
  • Corporate: we’ve found ‘corporate-entity-person-with-significant-control’ e.g. company 01047315, 00305979 although the spec suggests ‘corporate-entity-with-significant-control’.
  • Legal: ‘legal-person-person-with-significant-control’ is suggested by example data although ‘legal-person-with-significant-control’ is suggested from the spec.
  • Super-secure: ‘super-secure-person-with-significant-control’ is suggested by example data.

Corporate persons - further info

As an aside, it should be possible to get profile / overview information on a
corporate PSC more certainly than just looking up the name. The corporateEntity-resource
has an “identification” field with a “registration_number” member. We’ve found
that these contain the company number. Of course it’s probably wise to run a few checks e.g.

  • “country_registered” (or indeed in the case of 01047315 “place_registered”) fields
    suggest this is within the UK. The spec even shows “place_registered”: “Companies House” but I think this is not definitive…)
  • the “registration_number” is a valid company number.

(Incidentally if anyone has a complete company number spec. that would be appreciated! The basics are shown on page 7 of the Uniform Resource Identifiers guide but this doesn’t seem to mention UK establishment companies e.g. “BR001168” or companies with letters as a postfix e.g. “SP1290RS”, “IP29074R”).

officer_role values - meaning of "corporate"
#2

I arrived here looking for a definitive list of values for “kind” - still seems to be vague and undocumented after 7 years! Anyone got a link to full list of possible values? At the moment I am going with:

Individual = 'individual-person-with-significant-control',
Corporate = 'corporate-entity-person-with-significant-control',
Legal = 'legal-person-person-with-significant-control',
SuperSecure = 'super-secure-person-with-significant-control',
#3

Where were you looking? It was undocumented for some time but the Companies House Documentation does now have a list - see their PSC List resource documentation. The values are:

individual-person-with-significant-control
corporate-entity-person-with-significant-control
legal-person-with-significant-control
super-secure-person-with-significant-control
individual-beneficial-owner
corporate-entity-beneficial-owner
legal-person-beneficial-owner
super-secure-beneficial-owner

The additional beneficial-owner entries refer to the more recent registration scheme for Overseas Entities who own UK land or property. Corporate entities thus registered also appear as a type of company (“company number” beginning “OE”).

Hope this helps.

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#4

@voracityemail brilliant! Thanks for responding so quickly. Exactly what I was looking for. I thought I was looking in the right place here:
https://developer-specs.company-information.service.gov.uk/companies-house-public-data-api/resources/statementlist?v=latest

#5

Yes - that would be to list all PSC statements, which are a (somewhat) separate thing from the list of PSCs. There can be general statements (applying to the company / all PSCs) and also particular PSCs can be associated with a statement via the links.statement member in e.g. PSC list. Any such link may be recorded in both directions e.g. there can be a link from a statement back to a PSC also in the links.person_with_significant_control member.

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#6

Thanks, great to have an explanation of it - I’m just crashing around trying to find stuff. I discovered there is a great little TypeScript library I can use yesterday which I think will make my life much easier: https://github.com/companieshouse/api-sdk-nod

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#7

Went through exactly the same myself. I’ve been helped by the existence of this forum and others posting here.

A few people have made libraries / helpers. There’s also an effort to make a resource explaining things by another poster here. I think they were welcoming PRs if you had any information you found which was missing / incorrect / not sufficiently clear from the official documentation.

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#8

Same here. As voracityemail said, I’ve put up CHGuide to fill the perceived gaps in documentation. Please feel free to send a PR, if you need any help give me a shout, I’ll happily merge any good documentation thats submitted.
Also on companies.stream for the last 6 months I’ve kept track of all the various resource kinds that come through on the streams. You can see schemas for each “resource_kind” on Sample events from Companies House Streaming API .
This is the tally counter of the number of each resource kind I’ve received on the PSC stream since December 2022 (taken at July 2023):

{
  'company-psc-individual': 2057005,
  'company-psc-corporate': 86583,
  'company-psc-legal': 1637,
  'corporate-entity-beneficial-owner': 9009,
  'individual-beneficial-owner': 25191,
  'legal-person-beneficial-owner': 393,
  'company-psc-supersecure': 12,
  'super-secure-beneficial-owner': 3
}

Hope thats useful to you.

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#9

Thanks @ebrian101. I am a little confused - your list of PSC is quite different from the list @voracityemail provided. I am calling the API endpoint: https://api.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/${companiesHouseNumber}/persons-with-significant-control
(existing code, we aren’t using the official npm package).

#10

Sorry Oliver, the list that I sent is for the streaming API, but I now see you’re referring to the REST API.
Apparently Companies House don’t use the same constants across those… (ie resource_kind does not match data.kind).
The values I provided are what get returned in the resource_kind field of the streaming API.
Sorry to add to the confusion.

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#11

@ebrian101 no apology required at all, I didn’t know there was a streaming API and am now very interested. Need to go and have a look!