The short answer
Companies House is the largest public record on UK companies, but it is one of six. The Gazette publishes insolvency notices, the Register of Judgments holds county court judgments, the Individual Insolvency Register lists personal insolvencies, and separate registers list disqualified directors and authorised financial firms. Each register answers a different question, and a full check reads the ones that answer yours.
Companies House remains the place to start: the filings, officers and charges tell you the company's own history. The registers below are what you add when the exposure is real, because the events that sink a customer or supplier first appear somewhere else.
The six registers, register by register
Accounts, confirmation statements, officers, people with significant control, charges. Search is free with no signup and covers the whole UK. It never shows judgments, insolvency notices or any trend across filings. How to search it properly.
The London, Edinburgh and Belfast Gazettes are together the official public record of the UK. Winding-up petitions, administration appointments, liquidations and creditors' meetings are published here first. A petition in the Gazette is public notice to every creditor at once.
The statutory Register of Judgments, Orders and Fines for England and Wales, kept by Registry Trust on behalf of the Ministry of Justice. County court judgments, High Court judgments and administration orders. Each search covers one name at one address and cannot link previous addresses, so match the address to the trading address. What a CCJ means for risk.
Personal insolvencies for England and Wales, searched by name or trading name, which covers sole traders. Records are usually removed within three months of a case ending, so a clean result means no live insolvency, not no history.
Directors barred by court order or by undertaking. A disqualified director signing your contract is a governance failure before it is a credit question. How to run the director search pairs this with the appointment history.
Every firm and individual the FCA has authorised or registered, with the permissions each one holds. Relevant when the counterparty sells financial services: an authorised firm checked against its permissions is a different question from a trading company's balance sheet.
When a Companies House search is not enough
The registers do not talk to each other. A company can hold a clean Companies House file while a winding-up petition sits in the Gazette and two CCJs sit on the judgment register, and nothing at Companies House will mention either. The judgment register in particular is invisible at Companies House by design: county court judgments are a court record, held by the court's registrar, not the companies registrar.
What none of the registers do
None of the six joins the record up. No register will tell you that accounts are trending down, that charges were registered in a rush before the year end, or that one late filing plus one satisfied charge plus one small CCJ is the pattern that precedes failure. Reading every register by hand, for every customer, every time a file needs refreshing, does not scale. That work is the analysis layer.
Black Flag Alert reads across the England and Wales record for the 5.1 million registered companies: filings, charges, county court judgments and winding-up activity, combined into one R-Score between 0 and 100 with a plain-English narrative behind it. Around 3.4 million companies carry a score today. The search needs no signup and leaves no footprint on the company's file.
One search across filings, charges, CCJs and winding-up activity, with the R-Score and a plain-English narrative behind it. Free to search, no signup, no footprint.