What a Company Secretary Actually Does in a Self-Managed Building

"Company secretary" sounds like it should involve a wood-panelled room. In a four-flat conversion in Walthamstow it involves remembering a date once a year and chasing your neighbour for a signature. Here is the honest version of the job.

The recurring jobs

1. The confirmation statement, once a year. The single most important thing on this list. It confirms your company's details are right, costs £50 online, and has a 14-day filing window after your review period ends. Miss it repeatedly and Companies House starts strike-off action against the company that owns your freehold. Our step-by-step guide covers it.
2. Keeping Companies House told when things change. A director appointed or resigned, an address changed, a share transferred. Each has its own filing and its own 14-day clock. These are the small things that go unfiled and quietly make the annual statement wrong.
3. Watching the registered office. Boring, and the highest-consequence item here. Every warning Companies House sends goes to that address. If it is a flat somebody moved out of two years ago, the whole early-warning system is pointed at a stranger's doormat.
4. Keeping the register of members up to date. This one is still a legal requirement, unlike the registers of directors, secretaries and people with significant control, which were abolished in November 2025. Who owns which share, usually tied to which flat.
5. Being the person post reaches. Not glamorous. It is the actual function.

The occasional jobs

• A flat sells, so a share transfers, the member register updates, and someone checks whether the 25% threshold moved. See share transfers.
• Someone joins or leaves the board, which needs its own filing within 14 days.
• The AGM, if your articles require one, with whatever notice and minutes they specify.
• Identity verification chasing, which is newer and more annoying than it sounds, since every director now needs a Companies House personal code before the confirmation statement will go through.

What it is not

It is not legal advice. It is not managing the building, arranging insurance, collecting service charges or dealing with contractors. Those are real jobs but they belong to the directors and the managing agent, not to the secretary role as such. And it does not carry a separate layer of personal liability the way being a director does, which is worth knowing if that is the thing putting people off. Directors' duties are covered in our plain-English guide.

Roughly what it costs you in time

Being specific, because "not much" is useless: a well-organised building with nothing changing is genuinely a couple of hours a year, nearly all of it in the fortnight around the confirmation statement. A building where a flat sold, a director moved out and nobody has looked at Companies House in eighteen months is a weekend, once, followed by a couple of hours a year after that.

The reason it feels heavier than that is not the workload. It is that it usually lands on one person who then cannot put it down, which is a different problem, and one we wrote about in when one director does everything.

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.