Companies House to open up UK business data to journalists

Journalists are to gain free access to information on all of the UK's three million companies from next spring, in the latest move by the British government towards open data.

The UK business registrar, Companies House, has announced it is scrapping the £1 fee charged for each document downloaded from its site and it will make company accounts, shareholding details and director appointments more easily accessible in data form.

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) says the UK will be the first country to establish "a truly open register of business information" – representing a "step forward in improving corporate transparency".

Finance and data journalists have welcomed the change – which could give rise to a new range of online tools for analysing corporate data when the move takes effect between April and June 2015.


Screengrab from CompaniesHouse.go.uk

Peter Kirwan, a business journalist for 20 years who teaches financial journalism, said it would open up opportunities for researchers and journalists to find clever ways of using and scrutinising the information.

He told Journalism.co.uk: "What always starts to get interesting in these open data situations is the completely new business propositions that can be built on top of the data.

"For economic forecasts it should be rather interesting. You're going to have this constant flow of company results coming in, you'll be able to slice and dice it at a very macro level. You could build a very big database of economic performance over time.

"There's absolutely no doubt that once you make data machine-readable and then free, very interesting things tend to happen."

What always starts to get interesting in these Open Data situations is the completely new business propositions that can be built on top of the data.Peter Kirwan

But the onus will still be on journalists to understand, interpret and analyse the data:

"Very often the numbers don't tell you very much – but sometimes they really do. Journalists have got to take advantage of it and do the work."

Abbott Katz, a data journalist who runs the Spreadsheet Journalism blog, said a lot depended on the format used to supply the data.

He said: "It would be in their interests to re-work the data into some kind of spreadsheet format.

"Once the data are in a manageable format, it doesn't necessarily mean the data are ready for subsequent analysis.

"It's not even a matter of accuracy of the data, it's the way in which the data are organised. There are all kinds of crucial issues in that regard."

Business secretary Vince Cable said in the BIS release that the move would "cement the UK's position as a leader in the open data agenda".

He added: "The government firmly believes that the best way to maximise the value to the UK economy of the information which Companies House holds, is for it to be available as open data. By making its data freely available and free of charge, Companies House is making the UK a more transparent, efficient and effective place to do business."

Companies House is one of four government agencies that have committed to providing more open data to journalists and the public at large. The other participating groups are the Land Registry, the Met Office and Ordnance Survey.

Journalism.co.uk runs a one-day course in financial journalism with practical advice on understanding and interpreting company reports.

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