I have noticed there has been a huge increase in unallocated company numbers since November 2025.
I am sure this is because registrations have been declared invalid due to improved vetting following legislation over the last year.
However, would it not make more sense to only increase the company number when a registration is validated rather than merely each time a new registration is received and processed?
For example in the block 16887600 to 16887699 there were only 14 valid registrations out of 100, while in block 16881700 to 16881799 there were only 11.
In other blocks, it is regularly 50% and more that are thrown out.
This started with companies being processed from 18th November 2025.
It is good that invalid registrations are being filtered, but it just seems very wasteful of the number allocations!
To illustrate, take a look at this SQL which shows how since late November 2025, blocks of 100 company numbers regularly have less than 50% valid registrations:-
select left(CompanyNumber,6) as c,IncorporationDate as d,count(*) as t from companies where CompanyNumber like ‘16%’ group by c having t<50 order by c desc;