How to Appoint or Remove a Company Secretary (AP03 and TM02)

Two forms, one clock, and a handful of loose ends. This is one of the genuinely easy bits of running a building's company, so it is worth doing properly rather than putting off.

Appointing a secretary (AP03)

1. Get their agreement first. Sounds obvious. Volunteering someone in their absence is a recurring feature of AGMs and a bad idea.
2. Collect their details. Name, and a correspondence address. Note this is a service address, not necessarily their home address, and choosing well here matters, see keeping your home address off the public register.
3. File the appointment (AP03) within 14 days of the appointment taking effect. Online through Companies House, free, or through software that files for you.
4. Record the date somewhere durable. The local register of secretaries stopped being a legal requirement in November 2025, but knowing who held the role and when still matters when someone asks a year later.

Removing a secretary (TM02)

1. Get the resignation in writing. An email is fine. What you want is a date you can point to.
2. File the termination (TM02) within 14 days of the resignation taking effect.
3. Then do the part everyone forgets, below.

The bit buildings forget

Filing the TM02 removes a name from a record. It does not move anything else, and the outgoing secretary is usually carrying more than the title:

• Is the registered office their flat? If so, change it. Otherwise every Companies House warning about your company continues to arrive at a home that no longer has anyone in it who cares. This is the single most common cause of a building sleepwalking into strike-off.
• Is the registered email theirs? Change that too. It is now a mandatory field and it needs to be an inbox somebody reads.
• Are they also a director? Resigning as secretary does not resign them as a director. That is a separate filing (TM01). Plenty of people assume one covers the other.
• Do they hold the only copy of anything? The insurance certificate, the AGM minutes, the lease scans, the Companies House login. Get those moved before goodwill runs out.
• Are they selling their flat? Then there is a share transfer to do as well. See transferring a share when a flat is sold.

If nobody wants to take it on

A common position, and worth being honest about. Legally, a private company does not need a secretary at all unless your articles say otherwise, so leaving the role vacant is usually lawful. It is just not costless: the companies in our data with nobody named had a strike-off rate around six times higher.

If the reason nobody wants it is workload rather than principle, the answer is usually to spread access rather than to find a martyr. If it is genuinely that no resident can take it on, a paid service is an option, though it costs meaningfully more than doing it yourselves.

This is one part of our full guide to the company secretary of a share of freehold company, which covers the whole role end to end.