The Three Gazettes at the Heart of UK Corporate Notice: How London, Edinburgh and Belfast Still Power Due Diligence in 2026

Introduction

If a company is being struck off, placed into liquidation, or coming back from the dead, the Registrar of Companies is required by statute to publish the fact in a 360-year-old newspaper. The London Gazette, founded in 1665 as the Oxford Gazette and renamed when Charles II's court returned to the capital after the plague, remains the official journal of record for English and Welsh corporate notices. Its sister publications, the Edinburgh Gazette (1699) and the Belfast Gazette (1921, in its modern form), perform the same function for Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Together the three Gazettes carry several hundred thousand statutory notices a year — and a not-insignificant portion of any serious corporate due-diligence workflow runs through them. Their digital migration to thegazette.co.uk is complete, the print editions are now compiled from the database rather than vice versa, and Companies House's strike-off pipeline has been routed through their structured-data feeds since 2018. Yet most search results still surface outdated explainers that miss what the regime actually does.

This is what the Gazette layer looks like in 2026, what it costs to use, and why the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 (ECCTA) has changed less of it than you might expect.

The statutory plumbing

The principal corporate-law hook is section 1077 of the Companies Act 2006, which obliges the Registrar to publish notice in the Gazette of the receipt of specified documents — the most consequential being certificates of incorporation, alterations to memorandum and articles, certain re-registrations, and notices of strike-off intentions. The Registrar's failure to publish has consequences: under section 1079, a third party cannot generally be fixed with notice of those matters until Gazette publication has taken place. That is the practical reason the Gazette has survived. It underpins a statutory presumption about when the wider commercial world is deemed to know something.

Outside corporate law, the Insolvency Rules 2016 (in particular Rule 1.10, Rule 5.20 and Rule 12A.27) require Gazette publication of notices in administration, liquidation, receivership and bankruptcy. Other statutes layer on more: the Charities Act 2011, the Trustee Act 1925 (the creditors-claims notice regime), and the Insolvency Act 1986 itself for the substantive insolvency steps.

Who publishes what — and where

Each Gazette covers a discrete jurisdiction. A company registered in Scotland gives notice in the Edinburgh Gazette, a Northern-Irish company in Belfast, and the rest in London. A company with operations across all three nations may end up publishing in all three. The publisher is The Stationery Office Ltd (TSO) under contract with the Cabinet Office; editorial responsibility sits with the Crown.

Notice volumes are estimates derived from the Gazette's published quarterly category totals; the three publications differ markedly in scale because corporate-insolvency activity is concentrated in England and Wales.

The categories that dominate corporate notice

By count, six categories make up the overwhelming majority of corporate-relevant Gazette traffic:

1. First Gazette notice of compulsory strike-off. Issued by the Registrar after a company fails to file accounts or a confirmation statement under section 1000 of the Companies Act 2006. Roughly 180,000–210,000 per year across the three Gazettes pre-ECCTA, falling materially since the section 1098A query-and-reject power began intercepting more filings at source.
2. Final Gazette notice for dissolution. The formal severing, typically two months after the first notice if no objection has been lodged.
3. Voluntary strike-off (DS01). Director-initiated, published once the form is accepted. Volumes have stayed broadly flat at 150,000–170,000 a year across the regime.
4. Creditors' voluntary liquidation (CVL). By far the largest insolvency category. Notice of appointment, statement of affairs and progress reports each require Gazette publication.
5. Members' voluntary liquidation (MVL). The solvent route; appointments alone run around 20,000–25,000 a year.
6. Restoration to the register. Both administrative restoration via Companies House (limited to six years from dissolution) and court-ordered restoration under section 1029 of the Companies Act 2006.

Notice categories of secondary corporate interest — appointment of administrators, receivers, scheme-of-arrangement court orders, and statements of claim under the Trustee Act 1925 — together comprise a further 10–12 per cent of throughput.

What the regime actually buys you

There are three concrete reasons a serious due-diligence workflow still touches the Gazette feed, none of which Companies House data alone covers.

Time-sensitive notice with statutory effect. A creditor or third party watching for a strike-off has, in practice, two months from the first Gazette notice to object. Companies House publishes the same dissolution intention in its WebFiling stream, but the Gazette publication date is the date that anchors the objection window. Sophisticated debt-collection teams therefore monitor the Gazette feed, not Companies House alerts.

Insolvency disclosure ahead of register update. When a company enters administration or CVL, the appointment is published in the Gazette before the Companies House register reflects it — sometimes by a matter of days. The Gazette is the most authoritative same-day signal that a counterparty has gone insolvent.

Restoration windows and dissolved-company traceability. Once a company is dissolved, it disappears from the live Companies House record. Tracing former officers, the dissolution date, and any subsequent restoration is materially easier through the Gazette's permanent archive than through reconstructed Companies House filings — particularly for pre-2010 dissolutions, where the Companies House digital record thins out.

Together these explain why the three Gazettes still exist, despite repeated proposals from the late 1990s onwards to fold them into the Companies House register.

What ECCTA changed — and what it didn't

ECCTA quietly reshaped the volume of Gazette notices without altering the statutory framework. The Registrar's new power under section 1098A to query and reject filings has reduced the number of dormant or improperly-filed companies that previously fell into the compulsory strike-off pipeline. Early data on rejections suggests a 7–9 per cent year-on-year fall in first-Gazette compulsory strike-off notices since the power was brought into force in March 2024.

What ECCTA did not change is the statutory requirement to publish. The three Gazettes remain the journal of record for the same categories of notice they covered before the Act commenced. No section of ECCTA amends section 1077 of the Companies Act 2006, and no consultation has been opened on doing so. The Gazette layer is, in regulatory terms, untouched.

This is worth dwelling on because it has been widely misreported. Several practitioner notes published in late 2024 implied that ECCTA's filing-rejection regime would supersede Gazette notice for strike-offs. It does not. The first Gazette notice remains the statutory trigger for the objection period; the Registrar's pre-notice rejection power sits before that pipeline, not within it.

Cost, access and the developer feed

The most under-appreciated feature of the modern Gazette is its API. The TSO data feed at thegazette.co.uk/data exposes structured notices in Atom format, free for personal and non-commercial use, with a commercial-licensing schedule for enterprise consumption. Notice categories can be filtered by company number, date range and type — materially easier to consume than the Companies House bulk data product for insolvency-watch purposes.

Placing a notice, by contrast, is not free. A standard insolvency notice in the London Gazette costs in the region of £80–£120 depending on word count, with Edinburgh and Belfast at a small premium for their lower volume. This is paid by the office-holder (the insolvency practitioner, the company secretary, or the Registrar where compulsory strike-off is involved); the fee is treated as a disbursement of the liquidation or administration estate.

These figures are indicative rather than official. The Gazette publishes a tariff that is reviewed annually each April; the numbers above are typical of the 2025–26 rate card.

The practical takeaway for 2026

For practitioners, three shifts are worth flagging.

First, the Gazette API has eclipsed paid third-party insolvency feeds in coverage. Several smaller credit-watch services have moved to it as their primary upstream in the past 18 months, layering value-add only at the alerting and matching layers. If you are paying for insolvency notice data and do not know where your feed originates, you may well be paying twice.

Second, the structured-data feed now flags individual notice types with machine-readable codes that map directly to Insolvency Rules 2016 references. This makes filtering — for, say, only first-Gazette section 1000 strike-off notices — reliable in a way it was not before 2022. Anyone running automated counterparty monitoring should revisit their filter logic.

Third, the ECCTA-driven fall in compulsory strike-offs means the Gazette is, paradoxically, becoming a slightly less noisy signal of corporate health: the residue is more likely to be substantive failure to file rather than dormant-shell decay. That has real implications for how the data should be weighted in counterparty risk scoring.

The three Gazettes are not glamorous, and they will never be the headline of a Companies House reform programme. But they remain the only statutorily-grounded notice channel for UK corporate insolvency events — and at a fraction of the cost of any commercial alternative, the smart end of due diligence has known that for a very long time.