Sources

This page sets out where the information on Dittabase comes from, the licence under which each source is used, and how to have something corrected. It applies from 16th November 2026.

Companies House

Most of what Dittabase shows comes from the register of companies kept by Companies House: each company's details and status, its officers, its persons with significant control, its charges, its filing history, and the accounts and other documents it has filed. We obtain it from Companies House's bulk data products, including its company, accounts, persons-with-significant-control and officer appointments products, and from its public data service.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

The Open Government Licence does not cover the copyright of others in the documents companies file, such as their accounts. Filed documents are available to view and download because the law requires them to be open to public inspection; we offer them in our reader for that purpose.

Companies House is not responsible for Dittabase, and our use of its information does not imply that it endorses us.

The London Gazette

We use notices from The Gazette, the official public record, about companies (for example insolvency and striking-off notices).

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The Gazette is Crown copyright. Its notices are re-used subject to The Gazette's own terms and conditions, which place conditions on how notices may be used, including that their meaning must not be distorted and that some personal information in them may not be re-used. We do not re-use notices about the personal insolvency of individuals. [[SOLICITOR TO CONFIRM the current Gazette re-use conditions and this wording.]]

Contracts Finder and Find a Tender

Public contracts awarded to companies come from the UK government's Contracts Finder and Find a Tender services.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Press and news reports

Some information about deals (the parties, the date and sometimes the price or the advisers) is drawn from press releases and news reports. We take only facts from these reports, and we link to the report where the fact came from, showing its title. We do not reproduce the text or pictures of articles. The articles remain the copyright of their publishers.

Figures read by machine

Many figures on Dittabase have been read from filed documents rather than typed in by a person.

• Accounts filed in tagged form (iXBRL) are read from their tags.
• Scanned accounts are read by optical character recognition, so that they can be searched in the reader.
• Some figures, and deal prices, advisers and sectors, are read from accounts notes and press reports by language models.

Figures read by language models, and figures for companies read in from the register on request, are not checked by a person. The site says where this is so. Please check anything material against the filed document, which our reader links to.

Our own work

The selection, arrangement, matching and analysis of this information, including sector classifications, medians, deal matching and the figures we derive, are our own work, and the resulting database is protected by database right and copyright. Our terms of service explain how it may be used.

Attribution when you use our data

If you reproduce information from Dittabase that came from Companies House, The Gazette, Contracts Finder or Find a Tender, please include this statement with it:

"Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0."

Corrections

If information about a company or a person is wrong on Dittabase, the quickest route depends on where the error lies.

• If it is wrong at Companies House, the correction must be made there, as we reflect the register. Directors, secretaries and PSCs can be corrected by the company filing the right form, and some errors on the register can be put right by applying to Companies House. See Companies House's guidance on correcting information on the register and on protecting your personal information on the register. [[ACTION: replace these with the exact GOV.UK guidance links before launch.]] Once the register has been corrected, the change will reach Dittabase when we next refresh our data; tell us if you would like us to refresh sooner.
• If it is right at Companies House but wrong on Dittabase, for example a figure misread from scanned accounts or by a model, a deal matched to the wrong company, or a name attached to the wrong person, tell us at [[CONTACT EMAIL]] with the company's name or number and what is wrong, and we will look into it and correct it promptly.
• If it comes from a press report that is itself wrong, tell us and we will remove or correct the fact on Dittabase; the report itself is a matter for its publisher.

Members can also report a problem using the button in the corner of every page. If you are named in the information and want to object to its use, see part two of our privacy notice.