How to Keep a Register of Directors Up to Date (AP01 and TM01)

Every company, Resident Management Companies included, has to tell Companies House who its directors are and when that changes. In a self-managed block this happens more often than you'd think, since boards are volunteers, and volunteers move flats, lose patience, or get quietly voted off at the AGM.

Appointing someone new (form AP01)

1. Verify their identity first. A new director must complete Companies House identity verification and get a personal code before their appointment is notified, not after.
2. Get their consent to act, plus the details: name, date of birth, nationality, occupation, residential address, and an address for correspondence, worth reading our guide on keeping a home address off the public register before defaulting to a residential one.
3. Notify Companies House within 14 days, personal code included.
4. Update your own records with the appointment date.

Recording a resignation (form TM01)

1. Note the resignation date, ideally in writing, even just an email.
2. Tell Companies House within 14 days.
3. Update your own records with the date, keeping the old entry rather than deleting it. The company needs to show who was a director on any given day.
4. Check what else needs reassigning. A former registered office contact or registered email holder now needs replacing.

Your own records still earn their keep, just not by law any more

This changed recently and a lot of guidance online has not caught up. Until 18 November 2025 a company had to keep its own register of directors alongside telling Companies House. That duty is gone: the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act abolished the local registers of directors, directors' residential addresses, secretaries and people with significant control, and made the Companies House record the authoritative one instead. The register of members is the one that survived, and you do still have to keep that yourself. We've set out exactly which registers went and which stayed separately.

Keeping your own record of directors is still worth doing, just as good housekeeping rather than as a legal duty. It's what you check before you file your next confirmation statement, since an out-of-date picture makes that filing wrong too.

Where self-managed blocks trip up

With boards of two or three people, resignations often happen informally. Someone simply stops coming to meetings, and nobody ever gets round to telling Companies House. It then lists someone as a current director long after they've moved out, which becomes a genuine headache later, at a sale, at the next statement, or when someone needs a signature from a person nobody can find. A director who never gets round to identity verification is now a second version of the same problem: directing a company with an unverified director is itself an offence. Sharing access across the whole board rather than leaving it with one person is the simplest way to stop either version happening unnoticed.

A TM01 is usually part of a wider handover rather than a standalone job, so handing the company over to the next board is worth reading alongside this. The harder case, a director who has simply stopped replying, is covered in when a director goes quiet.