In April 2025, Companies House launched a communications campaign to support the rollout of identity verification under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act (ECCTA). We started with a voluntary period where company officers were able to verify ahead of the mandatory date in November. By the time the voluntary period closed, more than 1.6 million people had verified their identity – 170% above our target of 600,000.
by Anna Ellis and Esme Turner
On paper, that looks like an unqualified success. And in many ways it was. But the most useful thing we can share with fellow communications professionals isn't the headline number. It’s what we learned about what really works, where comms can make the biggest difference but also where it has its limits.
The challenge we were actually solving
Regulatory communications is a distinct discipline. You're not selling a behaviour people might want to adopt. You're asking them to comply with something they didn't ask for, may not fully understand, and – especially during a voluntary period – have little immediate incentive to prioritise.
Our three core communications challenges were:
making the requirement understandable
making it feel relevant
reaching the people least likely to engage.
None of those are straightforwardly solved by good messaging.
What worked and why
We used COM-B analysis to identify three categories of barrier before we wrote a single word of campaign copy. Capability barriers meant many people simply didn't know what identity verification was or what they'd need to do. Opportunity barriers meant that even motivated people faced real friction – time pressures, limited digital confidence, uncertainty about which documents to use. Motivation barriers were perhaps the most significant during the voluntary period: without an immediate consequence for inaction, the rational response for many was to wait.
Understanding those barriers shaped everything – channel selection, message framing, sequencing, and the decision to invest heavily in video and short-form content rather than defaulting just to written guidance. For technically complex processes, format matters as much as content. That's not a new observation, but this campaign reinforced it: insight from our customer contact teams highlighted a clear appetite for video, particularly among audiences with lower digital confidence.
Email was our most effective behaviour-change channel –not because we sent a lot of it, but because we built the infrastructure to make it meaningful. The introduction of a legally required registered email address under ECCTA gave Companies House, for the first time, a direct digital route to every company on the register. That changed what was strategically possible. Paired with phased, insight-led messaging and real-time evaluation, it allowed us to refine messaging as the campaign progressed, and respond to what we were hearing from contact centres and stakeholders.
Each wave of emails produced a clear, measurable spike in verifications – evidence that for this audience, a direct, authoritative prompt was what converted awareness into action. By mid-September, we had already surpassed our original target of 600,000, two months ahead of the deadline.
This campaign gave us strong evidence for something many communicators already know: targeting the right people, in the right way, through the right channels, makes a measurable difference. The sectors we targeted with trade advertising saw an average awareness uplift of 14.2%, compared with 4.8% in non-targeted sectors. And our intermediary channels – accountants, agents, professional bodies – proved highly effective for reaching audiences who are hard to contact directly. These aren't surprising findings, but they're worth stating clearly: segmentation and trusted messengers deliver measurable returns.
What the numbers don't tell you
Here's the part that doesn't make it into award entries.
Exceeding a target by 170% doesn’t necessarily mean the experience was the same for everyone. Identity verification is a process that requires specific documents, a working device, and a degree of digital confidence that not everyone has. Some people found it straightforward. Others found it frustrating, confusing, or inaccessible – and no amount of clear communications can fully compensate for that.
This is where our customer service teams play a critical role, providing the human support, reassurance, and guidance needed to help people through the process. Ultimately, it’s a full team effort to deliver a positive experience.
The most important thing to understand when working on regulatory change is that not every barrier is a communications problem. COM-B is useful precisely because it makes this distinction explicit. Capability and motivation barriers can often be addressed through communications. Opportunity barriers – the ones rooted in time, access, resources, and the design of the service itself – usually cannot.
The most effective thing we did wasn't write better copy. It was work closely with policy, operational and user-centred design colleagues to understand where the real friction was, and ensure our communications reflected that understanding rather than papering over it.
Five principles for future regulatory communications
Based on this campaign, we'd suggest the following for anyone approaching similar work:
Start with barriers, not messages. Understand what is actually preventing your audience from acting before you decide what to say.
Know what communications can fix - and be honest about what it can't. Where barriers lie outside your control, name them clearly and share that assessment with those who can act on it. Know how the organisation is going to tackle the issues that communications can’t.
Use intermediaries as trusted translators. Professional bodies and sector intermediaries often have more credibility with hard-to-reach audiences than government communications ever will.
Design for the least engaged, not the most. Your easiest audiences will find their way. Your hardest audiences need content, channels and formats designed specifically for them.
Evaluate in real time and be prepared to adapt. A campaign that cannot respond to what your learning isn't really insight-led - it's just well-planned in advance.
What we learned
This campaign demonstrated that it is possible to drive exceptional compliance outcomes through communications . But only when communications is treated as a strategic function, not an administrative one, and only when it works alongside operational, policy and service delivery to achieve a common goal.
The headline figures are worth celebrating. But the more durable lesson is simpler: outstanding communications cannot fix every problem. That means working closely with service designers and customer-facing teams, making sure the barriers we identify are acted on beyond the communications team.
Anna Ellis is senior campaigns manager at Companies House, and Esme Turner is head of campaigns, insights and education at Companies House
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