Quick summary
Across thousands of London's self-managed freehold and Right to Manage companies, more than half have nobody named as company secretary, no single, individually reachable person responsible for compliance. Having one cuts strike-off risk roughly sixfold and overdue-plus-strike-off risk by about a third. Nine out of ten named secretaries are residents of the building itself, not an outsourced agent, which means fixing this gap is usually a matter of someone putting their hand up, not paying for one.
Ask around your building's board and there's a decent chance nobody's entirely sure whether anyone's actually the company secretary. That gap is more common than it feels, and, going by the numbers, more consequential than most boards realise.
The gap: more than half have nobody named
Looking across thousands of genuinely self-managed freehold and Right to Manage companies, more than half have no one named as secretary at all. Not "the role's shared informally", but literally no single person Companies House, or a leaseholder trying to chase something up, can point to as the person responsible for keeping the company's compliance on track.
What having someone named actually changes
Companies with a named secretary have a strike-off rate roughly six times lower than those without one, and their combined overdue-plus-strike-off rate is about a third lower too. Having a named secretary doesn't eliminate the risk entirely; a small number of companies with one are still under strike-off notice. But the gap between "someone's clearly responsible" and "nobody is" shows up sharply in the data.
It's not about hiring anyone
The instinctive objection is cost: paying an agent or accountant to take on the role. That's not what's actually happening in the buildings that have this sorted. Nine out of ten named secretaries live in the property they serve. This isn't outsourced admin, it's a resident, usually a director already, who's simply agreed to be the named point of contact. If your building's put off naming anyone because it sounds like a service to buy, the data says otherwise.
If nobody's stepped up yet
There's no formal ceremony required. A board can simply agree, at a meeting or over email, that one director will act as company secretary, update the record with Companies House, and let the rest of the board know who to go to. It's worth being honest about workload too: if one person's already quietly doing everything, naming them formally at least makes the arrangement visible, and worth reading our piece on what to do when one director's carrying it all if that's closer to your building's situation.
For the whole picture, see our guide to the company secretary of a share of freehold company.
Frequently asked questions
Does a Resident Management Company legally have to have a named secretary?
Private companies aren't required by law to appoint one, which is exactly why so many buildings never formally do. The data suggests it's worth doing anyway, since it correlates strongly with lower strike-off risk, even though it isn't mandatory.
What does a company secretary for a self-managed building actually do?
In practice, keeping track of filing deadlines, statutory registers, and being the person Companies House correspondence and reminders reach. It's an administrative role, not a legal or financial one, and doesn't require any qualification to take on.
Can more than one director share the role?
Companies House records one named secretary at a time, but that doesn't stop the actual work being shared. What matters most is that everyone on the board can see the same up-to-date records, whether one person or several are doing the day-to-day chasing.