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The towns filing the most accounts that do not balance
Registered office is a weak signal, but across 807,357 filings some places stand out sharply from the 17.4 per cent national rate.
Every set of accounts filed with Companies House carries a registered office. Sorted by town, across 60 publishing days, the spread is wide: the worst places on this list run at nearly twice the national rate of 17.4 per cent.
Key points
- Buckhurst Hill is highest of the towns filing in volume, at 30.2 per cent.
- The national average across 795,732 filings is 17.4 per cent.
- A registered office is an address for service, not necessarily where a business trades.
The towns
Towns with at least 250 filings across the series, ranked by the share of accounts reporting liabilities larger than assets.
| Town | Accounts filed | In deficit |
|---|---|---|
| Buckhurst Hill | 308 | 30.2% |
| Brentford | 526 | 27.0% |
| Hampton | 370 | 25.9% |
| Westcliff-On-Sea | 351 | 25.1% |
| Lancing | 265 | 24.2% |
| Harrow | 4,986 | 23.0% |
| Llanelli | 361 | 23.0% |
| Margate | 435 | 23.0% |
| Bideford | 256 | 22.7% |
| Barnet | 1,627 | 22.6% |
Read this one carefully
A registered office is an address for service. It is very often an accountant, a solicitor or a company formation agent, and a single such address can account for hundreds of companies that trade nowhere near it. That makes the geographic split the weakest signal this data produces, and it is why we publish it with the warning attached rather than as a league table of struggling towns.
The industry split is the stronger reading, because a company declares what it does regardless of where its post goes.
What happens next
As the series lengthens these rates will steady. A town with a few hundred filings can move several points on one busy week, so treat anything below a few thousand filings as indicative.
How this was produced. Companies House publishes every set of accounts filed with it as open data. Cap News downloads that file each working day, reads the tagged figures out of each filing and joins them to the company register. Nothing here is hand picked. The method sets out what is counted and what is not.