Company Restoration Service enabliing registration of struck off and dissolved companies at Companies House

Reasons for restoring companies:

Recovering assets,
Collecting unclaimed VAT
or tax refunds or
Pursuing legal claims
against a third party.

What is company restoration?

Many directors, creditors and shareholders think that once a company has been dissolved, wound up or struck off, that you cannot restore it to the register. This is a common misconception because you can. In most cases the company will have been struck off simply because they did not file either accounts or annual returns and ignored the reminders from Companies House.
Company restoration is what we do! We can assist accountants, solicitors, company secretaries and business owners in restoration of dissolved companies.

We can assist accountants, solicitors, company secretaries and business owners in restoration of a dissolved company.

Reasons for Company Restorations

You can apply to restore a company to the register for many reasons. Normally it is because a director or shareholder wishes to realize some actual or potential assets remaining in the company or about to become due to the company. Alternatively it may be simply to continue trading or to bring legal proceedings against a third party or to reclaim tax.

Under the new Companies Act 2006 there are now two procedures for company restoration. They are known as 1.Administrative restoration and 2.Company restoration by court order.

1.Administrative restoration

From 1st October 2009 there is a new provision for the restoration of a struck off or dissolved company in certain circumstances. The Companies Act 2006 section 1024 allows for a new company restoration procedure known as Administrative Restoration, which will be used to supplement the existing Court power to restore companies. It means that the Registrar of Companies has the power to restore a struck off or dissolved company to the register under the circumstances listed below. The Court power will still exist for those cases where the Registrar cannot act.

Administrative Restoration for a struck off or dissolved company can only be used where the company once restored to the register will continue to trade and:

the company was carrying on business / or in operation at the time of dissolution
the company has been struck off under sections 1000 or 1001 (power of registrar to strike off defunct company)
the application is made within a period of 6 years after the date of dissolution
the Crown has signified consent (bona vacantia issue)
the company has delivered all the necessary documents to bring the company up to date, i.e. all outstanding documents at the time of dissolution and any that have fallen due during the period of dissolution, and paid any relevant penalties under section 453 or corresponding earlier provisions (civil penalty for failure to deliver accounts) that were outstanding at the date of dissolution or striking off.

Application to be accompanied by statement of compliance and Treasury solicitor consent.

An application under section 1024 (application for administrative restoration to the register) must be accompanied by a statement of compliance.

The statement of compliance required is a statement:—

that the person making the application has standing to apply (see subsection (3) of that section), and
that the requirements for administrative restoration (see section 1025) are met.

The registrar may accept the statement of compliance as sufficient evidence of those matters.
In addition the Treasury solicitor has to be contact to obtain consent to the restoration.
We do all this for you.

Effect of administrative restoration

The general effect of administrative restoration to the register is that the company is deemed to have continued in existence as if it had not been dissolved or struck off the register.

If you do not qualify as being able to apply for restoration using the Administrative Restoration procedure then you need to use the Company restoration by court order procedure

Can't I just set up another company?

No, because the old company is not a "legal person" once it has been struck off and has no legal capacity to transfer its assets to the new company. If you set up a new company and pretend it is the old company this is unlikely to work and if it does you will have committed a criminal offence by so doing. There is no real alternative to getting a company restoration order.

Costs of an administrative restoration

Our fees to deal with the company restoration for you are £195 plus vat of £34.12 and there would be a fee of £100 payable to companies House and a fee of £70 payable to the Treasury solicitor making £399.12 in total payable in advance.

If having read this you now wish to make further enquiry or proceed to restore a company to the company register at Companies House please go to our UK company restoration Enquiry page.