UK Persons with Significant Control search

The UK PSC register went live in April 2016 under the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act 2015. It captures any natural person or registrable legal entity that controls more than 25% of shares, more than 25% of voting rights, the right to appoint or remove a majority of the board, or otherwise exercises significant influence or control. OpenRegistry exposes it as a first-class tool with no signup.

The PSC register is not the shareholder list

A 10% direct shareholder does not appear in PSC. A corporate trustee with appointment rights does. PSC and the Statement of Capital filed in the CS01 measure different things, and aggregators that conflate them produce the wrong answer for KYB.

What a PSC entry contains

• Name: natural person or RLE.
• Nature of control: a typed list. Common values are ownership-of-shares-25-to-50-percent, voting-rights-50-to-75-percent, right-to-appoint-and-remove-directors.
• Notification date: when the company filed the entry.
• Country of residence and nationality, for natural-person PSCs.
• Date of birth: month and year only. The day is suppressed for privacy.
• Service address. CH suppresses the residential address; this is the postal handling address only.

Walking corporate PSCs upstream

A common pattern is that a UK company's PSC is itself another company. A clean answer requires walking up the corporate chain until either individuals or a foreign-jurisdiction parent appears. OpenRegistry can automate the walk inside one MCP prompt, recursing through search_companies and get_persons_with_significant_control until it terminates.

A four-layer worked walk on Iceland Foods Limited, ending at the eight humans who hold the chain (Tarsem Dhaliwal 41.35%, the MC Walker 2008 Settlement 20.40%, Malcolm Walker 10.00%, the MC Walker 2021 Settlement 8.78%, Paulsammy 2007 Limited 7.33%, Richard Walker 4.04%, Alexia Gharagozlou 4.04%, Caroline Gooding 4.04%) is at /docs/case-studies/iceland-foods-chain-walk.

Worked example

// MCP — pull the live PSC register for any UK company
get_persons_with_significant_control({
  jurisdiction: "GB",
  company_id: "09446231"
})
// → array of PSC entries with nature_of_control, notification dates, etc.

What is not in PSC

• Trust beneficiaries are out of scope unless they meet the influence test directly. The Trust Registration Service (TRS) holds that data; it is HMRC-administered and not on the public CH register.
• Nominee shareholders show up in the CS01, but the underlying beneficial owner only appears in PSC if they pass the threshold via the nominee chain.
• Branches of overseas companies (FC-prefix) do not file a UK PSC; the home jurisdiction's beneficial-owner regime applies.

Why the 2022 amendment matters

The Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act 2022 introduced criminal sanctions for filing a false PSC entry, and tightened the verification regime for new corporate registrations. The data on PSC filings since mid-2023 is materially more reliable than older entries. OpenRegistry returns the live register, so newer entries reflect the stricter regime as soon as CH publishes them.