Companies Hub: a new engine for economic growth

How the UK can build on a unique asset to power the economy

Since the 2008 financial crisis, Britain's GDP growth has averaged only 1.2% per year, underscoring nearly two decades of economic stagnation. Even worse, GDP per capita growth has averaged roughly 0.5% annually, only a third of the OECD average of approximately 1.5%, highlighting the UK's prolonged productivity slump.

Recent Ipsos polling shows economic pessimism at historic highs: 75% of Britons expect economic deterioration over the coming year, against just 7% anticipating improvement - a net optimism score of -68, the lowest since tracking began in 1978.

New polling from Looking for Growth reinforces this gloom: 52% of respondents believe the government is handling economic growth poorly, compared with 23% who think it's doing well. Even more telling, 72% assert the UK needs radical reform rather than incremental adjustments.

In response, the government has pinpointed several critical weaknesses to target:

• High Industrial Energy Costs: UK industrial energy prices significantly exceed those in competitor economies like the US (30% lower), China (40% lower), and Germany (15% lower). For example, UK steel producers paid up to twice as much per MWh as their German competitors in 2023. To address this disadvantage, the government is proposing deeper cuts to network charges for industrial energy users as part of a broader industrial strategy.

• Planning System Inefficiencies: Bureaucratic barriers substantially delay infrastructure and housing projects. Reforms announced in 2025 aim to reduce typical planning approval times from an average of 18 months to under 12 months, which could boost construction output by up to 10% annually.

• Underinvestment in Key Sectors: Investment shortfalls remain pronounced in strategic sectors. The government plans targeted funding and incentives in eight priority industries (advanced manufacturing, clean energy, creative industries, defence, digital technology, financial services, life sciences, and professional services) to stimulate innovation and higher-value employment.

While these remedial measures are essential, especially the accelerated planning reforms, the government’s approach lacks strategic focus on Britain’s comparative advantages, sectors or systems where we already lead globally or could scale quickly with minimal friction. We don’t build successful careers by obsessing over our weakest GCSEs - we lean into our strengths. That mindset of doubling down on what we do best should help guide the UK’s next phase of economic policy, and unlock new ideas for growth.

Britain’s secret weapon

One of Britain’s most overlooked advantages is its .gov digital infrastructure, especially Companies House.

Unless you work in accounting or finance, chances are you’ve never used Companies House, but put simply, it is the UK’s official register of companies. At its core, it’s a free, public online database of every incorporated business in the country. It includes details such as company accounts, directors, registered addresses, shareholdings, and incorporation history. All searchable. All open.

It’s not just a registry. It’s economic infrastructure, a backbone for transparency and trust. This system empowers investors, journalists, competitors, customers, and the public to scrutinise and verify business information. It supports investor confidence, aids fraud detection, supports research, and lowers the cost of trust in economic relationships.

You might assume other countries offer the same. They don’t. Some, like Germany or France, operate similar registers, but access is paywalled and often slow. Others, like Japan or the US, have fragmented, state-level systems that offer limited or inconsistent information. In many emerging economies, corporate registers are either completely opaque or not meaningfully digitised.

The UK’s Companies House, by contrast, stands out as a global anomaly: fast, free, comprehensive, and centralised. As of 2021, it cost a mere £63 million to run a system that governs the registration and public disclosure of over four million active UK companies, representing trillions of pounds in combined turnover and asset value.

But there’s one big flaw. It is so easy to register a company in the UK — just £12 and a few online forms — that Companies House is flooded with fraudulent entities. Fake directors, fictitious addresses, and shell companies used for money laundering or sanctions evasion are widespread.

According to a 2023 analysis by anti-corruption NGO Spotlight on Corruption, more than 20,000 UK companies were linked to suspected Russian money laundering networks. In one infamous case, a five-year-old girl was listed as a company director. In another, a single suburban house in Cardiff was listed as the registered office for over 3,000 active companies.

Despite this vulnerability, the infrastructure of Companies House remains one of Britain’s most under-appreciated economic assets. We shouldn’t just fix it. We should turn it into the engine room of a modern economy.

Why Build on Companies House?

To take a step back, let’s look at the wider economic picture, and what a dream version of Companies House would aim to address.

Britain is teeming with talent, but the systems to connect that talent with capital, opportunity, and information are severely lacking.

• SMEs struggle to raise capital: fewer than 1% of UK SMEs receive equity investment each year.

• Start-ups lack visibility: the market for acquisitions and investment is relationship-driven and deeply opaque.

• Corruption and fraud thrive: Companies House is world-leading in transparency, but its ease of use also enables shell companies, fraud rings, and identity-masked ownership.

• Job discovery is fragmented: job seekers are scattered across boards, recruitment agencies, and informal networks, especially for start-up roles.

• UK citizens dislike inheritance tax: yet few realise they could avoid it by channelling wealth into active enterprise.

These problems all stem from a common root: a lack of economic connective tissue. What Britain lacks is digital infrastructure that brings economic actors into direct, transparent, trusted contact. A platform that not only informs but connects.

This is the gap a reimagined Companies House 2.0, what we might call the Companies Hub, could fill.

Companies Hub: What It Is

Companies Hub is a radical yet feasible upgrade to Companies House. It transforms the registry from a passive record-keeping tool into an active national economic platform. Think of it as GOV.UK meets AngelList, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, and HMRC — all in one smart, secure interface.

Core Features

Verified Transparency

• Mandatory ID verification for directors and beneficial owners

• AI-powered fraud scanning to detect suspicious patterns such as mass address duplication, fast dissolutions, or nominee layering

Investment & Acquisition Signals

• Companies can opt-in to flag themselves as open to investment, acquisition, or partnership

• Investors and acquirers can filter by sector, region, ESG classification, growth stage, and other customisable tags

This would democratise access to private capital, levelling the playing field for regional and underrepresented founders

Job and Talent Integration

• Employers can post job openings linked directly to their verified company profile

• Job seekers can search based on skills, region, sector, or real-time company growth indicators

Open Data and Discovery

• Public dashboards on UK economic activity by region, sector, and firm stage

• Exportable datasets for researchers, investors, journalists

• API access for third-party platforms, driving ecosystem growth

In short, the Hub would serve not just as a record of who exists in the economy, but as a living interface between companies, talent, capital, and the state.

Building on Former Ideas

The Hub would also serve as a natural platform for several proposals raised in our earlier articles.

• A national job-matching system: as proposed in my "25 Radical Ideas" article, the UK could adopt a job-placement model similar to Singapore's, where the government helps pair job seekers with openings based on skill data, sector need, and regional priorities. The Hub could integrate this natively, creating a live map of supply and demand for talent.

• Inheritance tax for investment: I’ve also floated the idea of allowing individuals to reduce or eliminate inheritance tax liabilities by making qualified investments in UK companies. Through the Hub, this could be implemented with precision: approved firms could be tagged as IHT-eligible, with automatic reporting and compliance built into the system. Regional or sector tags could help find local businesses, or those addressing needs inheritors care most about. Redirecting wealth into productive enterprise could become as easy as ticking a box.

These additions wouldn’t just make the Hub more useful - they’d anchor it in the wider national mission of growth, trust, and opportunity.

Overcoming Bottlenecks

Britain’s growth problem isn’t just a matter of investment or innovation. It’s about friction. Too many firms stall out not because they fail, but because the system makes it easier to stop than to scale.

A prime example is the VAT threshold. Once a company reaches £90,000 in annual turnover, it must register for VAT—a process that brings new costs, complexity, and risk. Many founders respond by capping growth. Dan Neidle’s Tax Policy Associates estimates 26,000 firms deliberately stall to avoid this threshold. HMRC data for 2018/19 shows a sharp drop in companies reporting just above £90k compared to just below - evidence of a clear cliff-edge effect.

The Companies Hub could change this. With live access to turnover and filing data, its AI wouldn’t just record these milestones. It would anticipate them—flagging companies as they approach key friction points: nearing the VAT threshold, entering a high-potential export market, or hitting the scale for Series A funding.

Rather than letting growth stall, the Hub could ping founders with exactly what they need next: funding options, VAT guidance, export tools - tailored to where they are in the journey. It could also alert local professional advisors - accountants, funders, regional growth hubs - when relevant companies near key tipping points, creating a new business model around helping firms push through rather than back off.

In short, the Hub could turn a nation of near-misses into a generation of scalers.

Common Questions and Criticisms

Q: Won’t this flood the platform with low-quality companies? A: Yes, inevitably. But that’s precisely the point: transparency. Investors already face a market saturated with low-signal firms. They just do it in private spreadsheets or behind expensive paywalls. A public platform levels the playing field. Smart filters, tagging, and public metrics will separate signal from noise. There is also space for value-added services: advisory firms could build premium products that curate the best opportunities.

Q: Isn’t this too complex for government to build? A: It would be if we were starting from scratch. But we are not. Companies House exists and works. It is one of the few public sector IT systems that operates reliably, openly, and at low cost. The Hub would build on this base, adding new capabilities step by step.

The UK has a long and painful history of failed, over-budget government IT projects. That is why we recommend a competitive MVP approach. This is how innovation agencies and successful govtech projects work globally. Three teams, one internal and two external, each build a prototype. The best-performing is scaled. Crucially, this does not require building the whole vision at once. We could start with a single feature, like the job-matching layer, and expand only what proves useful and effective.

This approach not only reduces risk, it also ensures that early versions of the Hub are shaped by real-world users, not Whitehall theory.

Q: Won’t this just benefit London and big cities? A: Not if designed properly. The Hub’s filters and alerts can be regional by default, spotlighting companies, job opportunities, and growth-stage firms across all UK nations and regions. In fact, by making small and rural firms more discoverable, it could do more to level the geographic playing field than any grant scheme. This is digital infrastructure that brings the periphery to the centre.

Q: Isn’t this just bureaucratic creep under a tech label? A: On the contrary, this reduces bureaucracy. The current system is fragmented: multiple agencies, outdated portals, overlapping regulation. The Hub simplifies the state by turning scattered administrative functions into coherent infrastructure. Fewer steps, fewer portals, faster outcomes.

Q: What’s the actual economic return here? Isn’t this just digital busywork? A: Quite the opposite. The Hub is designed to reduce friction at multiple stages of economic life: firm formation, hiring, investment, exporting.

According to research from Tax Policy Associates, roughly 26,000 UK businesses deliberately hold turnover below the VAT threshold, resulting in an estimated £350 million in lost annual turnover. Even modest success in helping these firms scale would unlock significant latent output.

Meanwhile, Make UK has estimated that if just two-thirds of SME manufacturers achieved their stated growth ambitions, it would add £83 billion to the economy over the next decade. That is equivalent to over three percent of current GDP. The Hub can support this by improving access to finance, talent, and export readiness.

And scale-ups, though only one percent of UK SMEs, already contribute nearly £500 billion to the economy annually, according to the Social Market Foundation. That is nearly a quarter of the UK's total GDP. Supporting even a small number of additional firms in making the leap to scale-up status could produce disproportionate returns.

Finally, the API of the data made available through the Hub could open up entirely new economic territory. By giving developers access to structured, real-time company information, the Hub would enable a wave of innovation in search tools, market analytics, due diligence software, and regional investment platforms. In the same way that Transport for London’s open data led to over 600 active apps and tools in the mobility space, this could spark a similar ecosystem for business intelligence.

So no, this is not digital busywork. It is a strategic bet on UK productivity, built on real data and grounded in the daily barriers that hold growth back.

Q: What impact will the new ID rules have in practice? A: A major one. Mandatory ID verification for directors and beneficial owners will make it vastly harder to register fake or fraudulent entities. That means fewer shell companies for money laundering, fewer scam investment vehicles, and better visibility into real ownership, particularly across complex corporate chains.

The impact of the current loopholes is substantial. Transparency International has linked UK companies to hundreds of billions in suspicious transactions globally. The government’s own 2023 National Risk Assessment flagged company formation abuse as a major vector for money laundering, especially through the use of opaque entities. In one estimate, the UK has been home to more than 100,000 companies with characteristics of front or shell companies.

This is not just about crime reduction. It is about rebuilding trust and increasing economic efficiency. When every company has verified leadership and accountable data, legitimate firms can stand out more clearly. That increases investor confidence, reduces due diligence costs, and shortens transaction cycles. A cleaner marketplace is a faster marketplace.

Closing Thoughts

This isn’t another government website or business support scheme. It is about putting in place a piece of national infrastructure that can clean up abuse, unlock hidden value, and give people and investors a clearer view of what is actually happening in the economy.

Companies Hub would:

• Block fake companies used for fraud and laundering

• Connect overlooked firms with funding, jobs, and markets

• Let people invest locally, in sectors they care about

• Create a fairer, more efficient business environment

It is a simple idea with wide application: turn a passive registry into an active platform. Build on what already works. Start with what helps. Let it grow.

This is a radical reform that does not require a revolution. It could be built in one Parliament. It could change how the UK economy works for decades.

We should get on with it.