Mutual society registration lacks Companies House-grade digital infrastructure
Registering a society with the FCA costs £40–£950 depending on whether you adopt a sponsoring body's model rules (which themselves carry fees), versus ~£50 same-day online company incorporation. Registration takes 10 working days, cut from 15 only in December 2025. The Mutuals Public Register is largely scanned documents with no API, structured data or bulk download; the new FCA Mutual Societies Development Unit adds support staff, not infrastructure. There is no digital filing parity with Companies House.
Formation friction compounds: every co-op, community energy society, community pub and land trust pays a time-and-fee toll companies don't. Machine-readable registry data is also the precondition for research, credit-scoring and funder due diligence on the mutual economy, none of which is currently possible at scale.
A rebuilt digital mutuals registry with open API and bulk data, free statutory model constitutions, and same-day filing, delivered by the FCA or by transferring the registration function to Companies House; a costed line in the mutuals strategy.
// State-led: Instrument: FCA registry rebuild or statutory transfer of registration to Companies House, costed in the mutuals strategy.
Registry modernisation is real infrastructure with a proven Companies House template, but the FCA half-owns it, stakes are sectoral, and no closing date makes now decisive.
One gap, several dossiers: entries folded into this one (1)
The research pass surfaced this gap independently in more than one domain. Those entries are merged here so the map counts it once: the same registration-infrastructure gap: Companies House-grade digital filing and model rules for mutuals.
№ 113 · Paper-era co-operative registration and no digital-first mutual legal form (Portable sovereignty)
Registering a co-operative or community benefit society through the FCA remains slower and costlier than forming a company at Companies House, and the Mutuals Public Register is not API-accessible. The Law Commission's review of the Co-operative and Community Benefit Societies Act (consultation closed December 2024, report due 2026) proposes modernisation, and its July 2024 DAO scoping paper recommended reviewing the Companies Act to accommodate technology-mediated governance, with no government action since. Platform co-ops wanting digital-native governance (online voting, programmable membership records) shoehorn into unsuitable forms; Loomio and Decidim supply the software but the law does not recognise digitally-native operation.
Its fill: Prompt implementation of the Law Commission's 2026 recommendations, a digitised FCA registration pipeline with an API-accessible register, statutory clarity on electronic member decision-making, and model rules for digital-first co-operatives.