From 1 October, the home addresses of directors registered at Companies House will no longer be publicly available and companies will instead be required to provide a "service address" for public information.

The legislation comes after several incidents of harassment of company directors, most famously those of Huntingdon
Life Sciences, where the directors of the research company were targetted by animal rights activists in a sustained terror campaign.

However, Mark Halstead, red flag operations director at Begbies Traynor, said the service address, which can
be anywhere, would aid directors deliberately at­­tempting to hide their past.

"Checks that can be made against directors are being removed. It is a fraudsters' charter. Without access to a home address, the fail safe to stop fraudulent directors' is not there," he said.

Credit checking agencies are also concerned, warning that the effectiveness of Know Your Customer (KYC) checks would be hampered by the lack of information.

Rupert Rudd of credit checking agency ICSM said: "The home address ties the directors into other di­­rector­­ships. Without it, companies will have a lot less in­­for­­mation on prospective clients."

Agencies are reportedly spending tens of millions of pounds to bring their systems on stream for the introduction.

Companies House will continue to hold  director's full residential addresses and give access to  only the police and the HRMC. It also said it "may provide them to credit agencies". However, Halstead warned there was a risk this would increase costs for companies in the print industry.

"There are a number of smaller databases that have worked alongside smaller businesses," he said. "The risk is that these changes will push up the cost of accessing credit referencing for the print industry."

However, Richard Barham, a partner at law firm Denton Wilde Sapte, said that Companies House would still hold the director address and access would be granted if there was a need for the authorities to see it.

Companies House legislation

• Directors will be required to file a service address on the public record at Companies House, which may for example be their company’s address
• A director’s private address will be held as "protected information" at Companies House
• "Vulnerable" directors will be able to apply to the registrar for their addresses not to be provided to credit reference agencies