Name: Rude companies.
Age: Let’s assume ancient.
Appearance: A row of outraged citizens spitting out their tea at a passing white van.
Brilliant – this is just going to be a long list of naughty puns, isn’t it? No, it’s not. This is going to be a steely critique of the conservative views and anti-entrepreneurial attitude of Companies House.
Oh, OK. Bit disappointing. But necessary, I’m afraid. It has just been revealed that Companies House has this year banned more than 350 limited companies from using names that were deemed to be in bad taste.
Terrible. Just out of interest, what did they include? I don’t see why it’s relevant to this piece of serious journalism, but the banned names included Bell End Holdings and Little Pricks Acupuncture.
Awful. Right? Did nobody think of the owners? The operators of The Bad Bitch Boutique probably spent a lot of time and money coming up with a brand identity, just for the big suits at Companies House to smash it to pieces at the earliest opportunity. The air-conditioning engineers who called their business Stiff Nipples probably had a van made up and everything.
Oh, they did. They did?
I saw a Stiff Nipples van less than a month ago. Well, yes: limited companies are allowed to trade under other names, just not use them officially.
Right. This seems like a lot of work for Companies House. In fact, this is a light year for them. In 2021, it banned more than 800 names. These included Fit As Fork, Pervert Cat, Building That Fought Hitler and The Great Big Corrupt Company. In 2018, it banned companies called TittyGoHard and Stop Making Everything Shit.
Probably for the best. You don’t want to be the receptionist who has to answer the phone with: “TittyGoHard, how can I help you?” But still, this censorship is outrageous.
Does Companies House have a good reason for it? It claims to have a duty to ensure that no names it registers have “the potential to offend”. This is in addition to names that could be perceived as being fraudulent, or erroneously connected with the government or the royal family.
This is boring. Give me more banned names. A courier firm wanted to call itself About Effing Time. And we had better not forget Poop.
Brilliant. More! Better not. According to the Sun, some of the banned company names were racist or homophobic.
Ah. At least we’ll always have Stiff Nipples.
Do say: “Company names shouldn’t offend.”
Don’t say: “I guess now isn’t the time to register my DIY business, STD Contractors.”
