The tax nobody complains about
British businesses spend 11 million hours a year proving they are who they say they are. Today we launch our new report calling for UK Government to fix this: we call it BizPass.
This summer we commissioned Stack Data Strategy to poll senior business leaders, and somewhere in the questionnaire we put the obvious question: does your business spend too much time proving who it is?
Only 37% said yes. 36% actively disagreed.
That’s not the number you want when you’re about to argue this is a serious drag on growth. But dig one layer down, and a pattern starts to emerge… 84% of the businesses we surveyed verified their identity to an outside organisation in the past year, a quarter of them six times or more, and 43% repeated a check they have effectively already completed at least monthly. Three in five have had something concrete go wrong as a result: bank accounts delayed (17%), errors from re-keying the same information (15%), finance held up (12%), contracts lost (10%).
We found that most businesses don’t think they spend too much time on this, and yet most have been materially harmed by it. Each check takes about twenty minutes. Nobody experiences twenty minutes as an outrage. You do it, you move on, and by the time the bank account is three weeks late you’ve long since stopped connecting the delay to the form. It’s the accumulation of six, ten or fifty painless checks, none of which can see the others, that produces the delayed account and the lost contract.
It’s a tax businesses don’t know they’re paying. And because nobody complains about it, nobody in government has ever had to answer for it.
Eleven million hours
Six checks a year at twenty minutes each is two hours per business, which is trivial on its own. Across 5.6 million UK businesses it’s 11.2 million hours, or about 6,200 people working full-time on nothing but proving that businesses are who they say they are. Nor is the burden evenly spread. 45% of limited companies repeat a check monthly or more, against 23% of sole traders. It gets worse exactly as a firm gets bigger, exactly where it is raising money, hiring and onboarding new counterparties, and appetite tracks it precisely: 85% of firms with 11-49 employees say they’d use a business digital identity, against 52% of sole traders. The pain rises as firms scale. For firms in our ecosystem this is the point where they shift from startups to scale-ups. This is the very definition of a tax on growth.
What we’re proposing
We’re calling on the Government to introduce a “BizPass”, a single verified credential a business presents instead of starting from scratch every time. This would function as a passport for the business rather than the person, checkable by a bank or a buyer in seconds, confirming two things: that this business is real and in good standing, and this person is entitled to act for it.
That second half gets more complicated in practice today. Knowing a company exists is easy; the register has done it for a century and a half. Knowing whether the person in front of you can actually sign for it is what holds up bank onboarding, procurement and grant applications, and there is nowhere authoritative to look it up. A company can assert who its signatories are; nothing confirms that against a record the state constitutes. Singapore and Australia established exactly that root years ago.
Why now
Between November 2025 and 18 November 2026, six to seven million directors and persons with significant control are verifying their identity with Companies House. It is the largest identity assurance exercise the British state has ever run, it is happening now, and businesses are already paying for it. Say today that it will produce a credential they can reuse, and a compliance programme becomes an asset they get back. It costs nothing. It’s a sentence. Say it in 2027 and you’re asking several million people to feel differently about a bill they’ve already settled. There’s a second clock too. From December 2027, European banks must accept identity wallets from EU businesses: a French SME proves itself in one tap while a British one couriers documents.
One thing this is not
It is not a personal digital ID, and we understand why anyone hearing “business digital identity” reaches for the same objections. But a company is a public, statutorily-disclosed legal entity whose directors, address and accounts the state already publishes on a register anyone can read. There is no privacy case against reusing verification of facts that are already public.
Nor does any of this oblige a business to do anything. No business would be required to hold a BizPass in the short term, but eventually departments would be required to accept one, and it is aspirational for it to become the de facto way that every single business interacts with every single part of the state.
Control stays with the business with a BizPass, and that’s what firms told us matters most: security, clear access rules and control over what’s shared all rank above any promise of a faster service.
What we’re asking for
Four things in the short term, none of which need legislation: declare that the verifications now under way will yield a reusable credential; name a single body accountable for delivering it; issue that credential to verified companies, with a lookup so a counterparty can check it’s genuine; and ready the legal machinery that already exists to carry information about organisations, not just individuals. Everything after that extends coverage to all 5.6 million businesses. The only primary legislation anywhere in the report is a single clause amending a definition Parliament passed last year.
Unglamorous work, and exactly the foundational plumbing a government serious about growth should want to own: deliverable inside this Parliament, starting with a decision that costs nothing, compounding for a decade.
We also want the Government to practice what it preaches, and use Smart Data powers to then enable business owners to connect up every interaction they have with the state. Imagine what would be possible if a business owner could port a previous UKRI application to save another few weeks of repeated hassle; or demonstrate successful receipt of R&D tax credits to prove that it should be in scope for business energy bill subsidy of innovative businesses.
Eleven million hours freed up for enterprise, innovation, or anything else more useful is the prize.