The Tax Nobody Complains About
British businesses spend 11 million hours a year proving they are who they say they are. Today, Startup Coalition is publishing a new report calling on the Government to fix that – we’re calling it BizPass.
This summer we commissioned Stack Data Strategy to poll senior business leaders, and put the obvious question to them: does your business spend too much time proving who it is? Only 37% said yes; 36% actively disagreed. Not the number you want going into an argument about growth-sapping red tape. But dig one layer down and a pattern emerges, 84% of businesses verified their identity to an outside organisation in the past year, a quarter of them six times or more, and three in five have had something concrete go wrong as a result: bank accounts delayed (17%), errors from re-keying information (15%), finance held up (12%), contracts lost (10%). Most businesses don’t think they spend too much time on this, and yet most have been materially harmed by it, twenty minutes at a time, none of the checks able to see the others, until the accumulation shows up as a delayed account or a lost deal.
Eleven million hours. Six checks a year at twenty minutes each is trivial per business. Across 5.6 million UK businesses, it’s 11.2 million hours, about 6,200 people working full-time on nothing but proving businesses are who they say they are. The burden isn’t even: 45% of limited companies repeat a check monthly or more, against 23% of sole traders, and it gets worse exactly as a firm scales, hires, and raises money. It is, by definition, a tax on growth.
What we’re proposing. A single verified credential, a “BizPass”, that a business presents instead of starting from scratch every time, checkable by a bank or buyer in seconds. It confirms two things current systems can’t: that the business is real and in good standing, and that the person in front of you is actually entitled to act for it. The UK register has answered the first question for 150 years; nothing today authoritatively answers the second. Singapore and Australia built that root years ago.
Why now. Between November 2025 and 18 November 2026, six to seven million directors and PSCs are verifying their identity with Companies House – the largest identity assurance exercise the British state has ever run. Say now that it will yield a reusable credential, and a compliance exercise becomes an asset businesses get back, at no cost. Wait until 2027 and you’re asking millions of people to feel differently about a bill they’ve already paid. There’s a second deadline too: from December 2027, EU banks must accept identity wallets from EU businesses, leaving British firms couriering paperwork while their European counterparts prove themselves in one tap.
What it isn’t. Not a personal digital ID, a company is a public, statutorily disclosed entity whose directors, address and accounts the state already publishes. There’s no privacy case against reusing verification of facts that are already public, and no business would be required to hold a BizPass in the short term.
What we’re asking for. Four steps, none requiring legislation: confirm the verifications underway will produce a reusable credential, name a body accountable for delivering it, issue it with a public lookup, and ready the legal machinery to carry organisational data, not just personal data. The only primary legislation in the whole report is a single clause amending a definition Parliament already passed. Unglamorous, foundational, deliverable within this Parliament, and it compounds for a decade.
Read the full report here.
BizPass was produced with polling from Stack Data Strategy.