Britain’s Company Churn
This chart tracks incorporations and dissolutions recorded by Companies House. These are registry events—not a direct count of operating businesses opening and closing—and the trailing-year view reduces monthly filing noise.
What does it show?
Net company creation in Britain peaked at 400 thousand in the trailing year to 2021; the latest year added just 33 thousand. Dissolutions have nearly caught up with incorporations — partly because Companies House is purging its register under new economic-crime powers.
Methodology
Monthly totals are obtained from Companies House advanced company search using incorporation-date and dissolution-date filters, then summed over trailing 12-month windows and shown in thousands. The latest three complete months are re-fetched on each run to capture revisions. Incorporations and dissolutions are legal-registry events, not direct measures of economically active business births and deaths. Incorporations can include dormant, shell, duplicate, or fraudulent registrations; dissolutions can be voluntary, compulsory, or administrative and may involve firms that were already inactive. Since 2024, Companies House has used new powers under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act to remove non-compliant companies, so part of the recent dissolution surge is administrative rather than economic.