Law and Lawyers Inside

Trading In The Uk? Ensure Your Website Complies With Uk Law

If you have a website and you’re trading in the UK, you need to ensure that it complies with UK law. You’ll find UK website law scattered across a number of pieces of legislation and so it’s a bit of a minefield getting it right. I’ll be looking at the essentials over a series of articles on website company law which I hope that you find useful.

Your first stop is to make sure you’re giving people the right info about your company. Registered companies need to disclose their registered name on their website under the Companies (Trading Disclosures) Regulations 2008 (SI 2008/495). Where you’ve got a section on someone else’s site, you’ll need to disclose your registered name there as well. The name you give needs to be your actual company name, so if you’re registered as ‘Phones 4 You Company Limited’ you can’t just write ‘Phones 4 You’ – you need to include the whole thing.

You also need to give a bunch of other info, including where your company was registered (e.g. ‘England and Wales’), your registered company number, and the address of your registered office.
So for example, you might write: “Phones 4 You Company Limited is a company registered in England and Wales under Company Number 9929955. Registered Office: The Old Mill … (etc)”.

If you’re a limited company but you don’t have to use the word ‘limited’ in your name (because you’re exempt under Section 60 of the Companies Act 2006) you have to also say that you’re a limited company.

The end result of all these requirements might look something like:

‘Phones 4 You is a trading name of Phones 4 You Company Limited company registered in England and Wales under Company Number 9929955. Registered office: The Old Mill, Town Square, Nottingham NG1 234′.

A good place to put this info is in the footer of your website and your contact page – this is where your visitors will expect to find it.

So why does this all matter? Surely nobody goes round checking websites for details like this? You’d be surprised. If you don’t get these requirements right, you should know that you may have criminal liability. If you have no reasonable excuse (and the reasonable excuses are fairly limited) the law regards your failure as an offence committed by the Company – and perhaps of more concern, by every officer of the company. So make sure your website sets out clearly all the information about your Company so that consumers are protected in knowing exactly who they are dealing with.