FOI release

FOI21/22-047 - Details of all companies that have gone into administration or liquidation since January 2021

Published 27 October 2021

Our ref: FOI21/22-047

Date: 02 August 2021

Dear

1. Re: Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Request

Thank you for your email of 2 July in which you requested from the Insolvency Service:

“I would like to submit a freedom of information request to request the details of all companies that have gone into administration or liquidation since January 2021. I have looked on the www.Gov.uk website but this information is not available. If possible could you provide this information via a CSV/Excel file.”

And your additional email of 3 July:

“Below is a list of the details of the companies that I require that have gone into administration/liquidation/dissolved since January 2021.

• Company Name
• Company Number
• Companies house URL to the company if possible
• Registered Office address
• SIC Code/nature of business”

Your request has been dealt with under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA).

I can confirm the agency holds most of the information that you have requested.

The following information is not held: Information on companies that have dissolved and Companies House URL for companies that have liquidated or entered administration.

Note that registered address information is held but the accuracy is unreliable, particularly for compulsory liquidations where matching has been conducted, and there are records with incomplete information. See section 16 (advice and assistance) below for further details.

I have provided a table at Annex A with the names, company numbers, street, area, town, region, postcode, insolvency procedure, SIC code to 3-digits, and date of registration/ court order date for every company that entered insolvency in the United Kingdom between 1 January and 30 June 2021.

Under section 16 of the Act (Advice and Assistance) you may find it useful to note:

Compulsory liquidations in England and Wales are sourced from a live administration system managed by the Insolvency Service. The registration date for these is the court order date. All other insolvency procedures are sourced from Companies House, with the registration date based on the date than an insolvency was registered at Companies House.

Companies with multiple insolvency procedures are included multiple times to give a full record of all registered insolvencies. This means that there may be some duplicate companies.

Address information for compulsory liquidations has been obtained by matching to the Companies House insolvency data based on the company number. Therefore, this information should be used with caution. Address data for 50 compulsory liquidations is missing, and these have been marked with “NA” in Annex A.

Address information is incomplete for all insolvency procedures, particularly for area, town, and region. Where this is missing, it has been marked with an “NA”.

In some cases, company address information held by the Insolvency Service may be the registered address of the Insolvency Practitioner (IP), who acts as an office-holder in an insolvency proceeding. Therefore, the information provided in this letter may not reflect the company registered address. Even where the data does accurately represent the registered address of a company, it may not reflect the location(s) of company activity or operation.

Compulsory liquidations in Northern Ireland provided may not align with numbers in the published Quarterly Insolvency Statistics. This is because the individual-level data provided was obtained from Companies House, whereas numbers in the published statistics are received in aggregate form from the Department for the Economy.

Company insolvency data as supplied by Companies House, contains a mixture of the 2003 and 2007 Standard Industrial Classification (SIC). Where a 2003 SIC code has been supplied, it has been converted to a 2007 code using a ‘best match’ approach using weighted tables provided by the Office for National Statistics. For compulsory liquidations in England & Wales, companies are matched against the Companies House register where possible, and SIC data are drawn from this source. Where matching is not possible, data from the Insolvency Service’s administrative systems are used instead. The Insolvency Service’s administrative systems capture 2003 SIC codes and are therefore converted using the same method as for 2003 SIC codes captured in Companies House data.

If you are not satisfied with the response we have provided you and would like us to reconsider our decision by way of an internal review (IR), please contact our Information Rights Team at foi@insolvency.gov.uk or by post at:

Information Rights Team
The Insolvency Service
3rd Floor
Cannon House
18 Priory Queensway
Birmingham
B4 6FD
United Kingdom

You also have the right to contact the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) if you wish for them to investigate any complaint you may have regarding our handling of your request. However, please note that the ICO is likely to expect an IR to have been completed in the first instance.

Yours sincerely,

Information Rights Team

The Insolvency Service

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Official receivers and the Adjudicator are Data Controllers in respect of personal data processed by the Insolvency Service. For the details about how personal data is processed by the agency, please see the full Insolvency Service Personal Information Charter here: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/insolvency-service/about/personal-information-charter