Academic research request — bulk officer appointment data (director interlock network construction)

Bulk Data Requests
1

I am an academic researcher constructing a board-interlock network of UK companies for a non-commercial academic study. I would like to request the officers bulk data product (or the closest available extract) covering the following:

Data points needed, per officer record:

  1. Company number (to link to Companies House/FAME identifiers)
  2. Officer/person unique identifier (essential — needed to match the same individual across multiple company appointments; without this, interlocks cannot be detected)
  3. Officer full name (as a fallback match key alongside the unique identifier)
  4. Officer role/type (director, secretary, LLP member, corporate officer, etc. — so I can restrict to natural-person directors)
  5. Date of appointment
  6. Date of resignation/termination (or confirmation the appointment is still active)
  7. Officer status (active/resigned)
  8. Nationality and country of residence (if included in the standard extract — not essential, but useful if available at no extra cost)

Coverage requested:

  • All UK-registered companies (not restricted to a sub-sample), covering appointments active or occurring at any point between 2008 and 2023 (the earlier years are needed to establish pre-existing network ties before my main 2018–2023 study window)
  • Both the historical snapshot and, if available, the daily/periodic update files for that window, so appointment and resignation timing can be reconstructed accurately over time

Format: Whatever your standard bulk delivery format is (I understand this is typically a fixed-width text file with an accompanying data specification) is fine — I can parse it on my end.

Purpose: This data will be used solely to construct board-interlock network measures (e.g., shared directorships between firms) for a peer-reviewed academic paper on corporate governance and UK companies. No commercial use is intended.

Please let me know if there is a standard request form or additional information you need from me (institutional affiliation, etc.) to process this.

Sincerely,
Mostak Ahamed, PhD

2

@mostak84 This is actually a far more involved process than a simple parse unfortunately. I built a director matcher across companies for convert-ixbrl.co.uk while building an IXBRL to JSON API and it was anything but straightforward.

Key issues being that person ID is not actually unique, same individual can get different IDs.
Using other information to link one person across companies is not easy either as CH only publish month and year of birth, addresses are not always up to date, variations in name spellings or order to name a few challenges.

As this is a research project and you seem to be technically inclined, I’d be happy to outline exactly the steps I took so you can replicate this at your end without going through the same trial and error process I did. Feel free to dm me.