New proposals will bring about the biggest changes for Companies House and the work we do since we began registering companies in 1844. We spoke to Alexandra Walters, Head of Policy at Companies House. Alex told us how the proposals aim to help combat economic crime and improve protection for people who run businesses. Companies HouseReformConsultationBusinessCompaniesUK BusinessTransparencyEconomic CrimeAccountancyfinancial servicespersonal data   Transcript   Gary Townley: Right. Thank you for downloading this Companies House podcast. My name is Gary Townley. I'm part of the External Communications team here at Companies House.   For those of you who don't know who we are, Companies House is an executive agency. We are sponsored by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, better known as BEIS.  Our role really is to drive confidence in the UK economy, and we do that by incorporating and dissolving limited companies. We register company information. We take that information from all the companies on our register and we make that that information available to the public. We've got 4 locations, all around the UK. So we've got one in Edinburgh, one in Belfast, one in London and our main office really is here in Cardiff, where we're recording this podcast this morning.   Now, I'm delighted to be joined by Alexandra Waters today who’s Head of Policy here at Companies House. Welcome Alex.   Alexandra Walters: Thank you.   GT: So over the next 10 minutes, this is sort of rather, a sort of specialist type of podcast really. It’s not like our general ones we do because this one will be talking about the government's consultation on corporate transparency and register reform. They’re new proposals, and they're going to bring in really the biggest changes that have happened at Companies House since we opened our doors back in 1844. So we’ll get the ball rolling. Good morning Alex. What’s the consultation about and why are we doing it?   AW: Okay, so we've been working really closely with BEIS to publish a very wide-ranging, quite high-level public consultation about reforming the company's register. As you referred to before, the biggest potential change, if these proposals are taken forward, since 1844. What we're looking to do, is make changes to give Companies House new powers to combat economic crime and improve protection for people running businesses, whilst at the same time trying to continue to minimise administrative burdens.   It’s a high-level consultation. So rather than proposing how we might do some of this stuff at the moment, we're sort of asking, should we be doing some of these things? So it’s high-level. It's all new. And at the same time, we'll be going through an organisational transformation, looking to transform the way we work to make sure we're fit for the future in our new role.   GT: Right okay. So the consultation has been out now for a few weeks and there are 4 main areas I believe. Do you want to just talk about the areas?   AW: Yeah, sure. I mean there are a lot of proposals in the consultation, but as you say, they generally group into these sorts of themes. The first one which I think is probably one of the most interesting to the general public and some of our key stakeholders, is around knowing better who's setting up, managing and controlling companies.   So what we're proposing is that we start doing some identity verification, which is something we've never done before. What we're suggesting is that we verify identities of directors, people with significant control and those individuals filing information on behalf of a company. We’re asking whether people think we should verify identities of shareholders too.     At the same time as that, we're looking to consider whether we should collect more information on shareholders. The information we collect at the moment on shareholders is quite limited and it's quite difficult to link information and track informati