Who Can Be Company Secretary of Your Building's Company?

There is a persistent belief that "company secretary" is a qualification, like being a chartered accountant. It sounds like one. It is not. For a private company it is a role, not a credential, and the bar to filling it is about as low as company law gets.

The actual requirements

For a private company, there are no statutory qualification requirements at all. The Companies Act sets out qualification standards for the secretary of a *public* company, covering professional bodies and relevant experience. None of that applies to your building's company.

So the honest list of what a secretary of a freehold company must be is short:

• A person, or in principle a corporate body
• Not the company's auditor
• Not someone disqualified from acting as a company director
• Not an undischarged bankrupt acting without permission

That is broadly it. No exam, no membership, no minimum age set by the Act for secretaries in the way there is for directors.

Who it does not have to be

Worth stating plainly, because each of these trips somebody up:

• They do not have to own a flat. A leaseholder's spouse, an adult child, a retired neighbour who sold up but stayed involved, all workable.
• They do not have to be a director. Though in most buildings they are.
• They do not have to live in the building. Though there are good practical reasons to prefer someone who does.
• They do not have to be paid. Almost none are.

Who it usually is

In the self-managed freehold and Right to Manage companies we looked at, nine out of ten named secretaries were residents of the building itself, not outsourced agents or professional firms. This is overwhelmingly a job that a neighbour picks up, not a service the building buys.

That matches what the role actually needs, which is not legal expertise but presence: someone who reads the post, notices a deadline, and chases three other people for a signature. A professional two counties away is often worse at exactly that than the person in Flat 4.

The one genuine judgement call

Choose someone whose circumstances are stable, because the failure mode for this role is not incompetence, it is departure. The registered office is often the secretary's flat, Companies House correspondence goes there, and when they move out without anyone updating the record, warning letters start landing at an address nobody reads. That is the single most common route from "fine" to "strike-off notice" in a self-managed building. We wrote about what to do when your secretary is selling up separately, because it deserves its own answer.

If you have a choice between the most organised person in the building and the one least likely to move in the next three years, the second is often the better pick, or better still, make sure more than one person has access to everything so it does not matter.

How to actually appoint them

Free, and about ten minutes at Companies House. Full walkthrough in appointing and removing a company secretary.

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.