A salute to transparency: UK Companies House Provides Free Access to Filings. BIIA member Encompass explains what this means for their business and customers.
As of 25 June Companies House now provides access to Company Filing History at no charge. The Agency plans to liberalize Officer searching, overseas data and other features at a later date. Their change in business policy is implemented using a new technology – called an Application Programming Interface or API that you can read about here.
This required the Encompass development team to change the way its obtains information from Companies House, and today Encompass releases this new capability. So, from a user experience perspective little in our product has changed, but there is a bigger picture.
The government’s ambition is for Britain to have “the most open, transparent government in the world” and it has defined its Open Data strategy as one means of achieving this goal. Companies House is an executive agency, sponsored by the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills.
This Department and thirteen other Departments have announced how they plan to make data they collect in their operations freely available – you can see the full list and each Department’s Open Data strategy at http://data.gov.uk/open-data-strategies.=
Source: Encompass Corporation
