Website display issue for restored company

This company restored by court order has a restoration filing available, but the website doesn’t show it (only “overview” is shown, the “filing history” tab is missing)

As a workaround, you can navigate to it directly if you know the URL.

There are missing details (eg registered address, officers etc), but I’ll overlook these given previous discussion here about lack of data for these court-restored companies long after original dissolution date (possibly ~1982 in this case).

There seems to be a similar display issue for all CIOs/SCIOs:

Perhaps because their “Company added to register” filings are all categorised for some reason as “court-order”?

{
  "filing_history_status": null,
  "items": [
    {
      "description": "legacy",
      "type": "CO-ADD",
      "paper_filed": true,
      "links": {
        "self": "/company/CE012896/filing-history/MzE5NTE2ODY4NGFkaXF6a2N4"
      },
      "date": "2018-01-12",
      "category": "court-order",
      "description_values": {
        "description": "Company added to register"
      },
      "barcode": null,
      "transaction_id": "MzE5NTE2ODY4NGFkaXF6a2N4"
    }

I agree that these are odd and unhelpful responses from the API.

For the restored company it should be clearer what is going on here. Maybe even CH can’t make sense of their data and thus Beta doesn’t show all the info in tabs! My guess would be this one is particularly odd - even WebCHeck only shows the one filing for a company that was incorporated 17 May 1954. Might be this one was dissolved for so long (before being restored by court order 28/07/2016) that all records were removed? The company profile returned doesn’t have a “filing-history” entry in the links object (not that either CH or anyone else would / should necessarily rely on that).

I wasn’t aware that any filing history details were recorded for charities (CE / CS). The law you mentioned when you brought these to my attention in a previous post seems to state that only the charities’ names should be recorded.

I imagine such cases are outside the vast majority of data - and indeed interest - for Beta / the API e.g. getting info on limited companies which are created then dissolved and that’s it. For the rest - which are quite diverse - maybe a simple improvement might be to add constants to those used in the “partial_data_available” field in the Company Profile? Currently it’s just used where:

  • the company itself holds info - e.g. Royal Charter Companies etc.
  • the Department of the Economy or the FCA holds data (Industrial and provident societies, Registered Societies, Investment Companies with Variable Capital etc.).

I’d have thought CH should certainly add a constant to cover the case of charities?

Two other points might be tidied up:
The “filing_history_status” field in the filing History list should be consistent. Here, for the restored company 00533417 this was “filing-history-available” and for the charities the field was absent. I suppose in a way that’s correct but wouldn’t be what I’d expect - for charities surely if you call filing-history enpoint you should really get 404 rather than an erzatz filing?

The “links” parameter on the Company Profile object would idally be the “switchboard” for indicating whether “meaningful” data was available. Mostly this seems to work but the “filing history” entry is missing for the restored company here. It was also not present for the charities - but then I’d expect that. I didn’t expect that they’d have a filing history, even a “dummy” one.

For reference here are some previous threads relevant to restored companies - there doesn’t seem to be a “standard” process.
Fullest discussion of companies which are restored by court order - the issue was not really resolved however:

Cases where companies have been restored but date of cessation is set unexpectedly, plus where company is listed as active in e.g. webCHeck but not available in Beta.

Case where a company was restored according to bulk data product but not on Beta.

Order of court to restore but company gives 404