What every RMC director must check first: a 2026 compliance baseline

Three new pieces of UK legislation have landed in a single Parliament. All three talk about personal director liability. If you have just become an RMC director, the role has changed more in the last three years than in the previous twenty, and most directors do not know how much.

This article is a baseline. If you do these ten checks within the first thirty days of taking on the role, you will know exactly where your block stands, and you will avoid the obvious early mistakes that produce real liability under the new regime.

It is written for directors of RMC and RTM companies in residential leasehold blocks of any size, and for share-of-freehold owners taking on the management responsibility for the first time. It assumes nothing - just that you can find the relevant documents and ask the right questions.

Why the baseline matters more in 2026

Three statutes drive most of the new exposure:

• The Building Safety Act 2022 introduced the Building Safety Regulator and a tiered regime of duties on "higher-risk buildings" (18m and above), but extended several principles to all residential blocks.
• The Fire Safety Act 2021 clarified that the structure, external walls and flat entrance doors of multi-occupied residential buildings are within the scope of the Fire Safety Order. In practice this widened what a Fire Risk Assessment must cover.
• The Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 imposed specific operational duties on the "Responsible Person" for buildings of 11m or above - including communal fire door inspections and resident information about evacuation.

Add the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024, and you have a regulatory environment where the director sitting at the top of a small RMC company is now expected to operate to a standard that previously sat with full managing agents. The standard has gone up; the support most RMC directors have access to has not.

The ten items to check first

The list below is not exhaustive. There are 25 or more compliance items that may apply to a residential block. But these ten are the ones that produce the most consequential exposure if missed, and they are the ones a buyer's solicitor, an insurer or a regulator will check first.

For each item, we have given:

• The statute or standard that sits behind it
• How often it needs doing
• What "good" looks like - in other words, what a clean record would show

What to ask the outgoing director or managing agent for

If you are taking on the role from someone else, the handover should include all of the above as physical documents. Specifically:

• The most recent FRA report and any subsequent review or action close-out evidence
• Fire door inspection reports for the last 12 months
• EICR certificate
• Asbestos survey (if pre-2000) and the current management plan
• Legionella RA and the monitoring log
• Buildings insurance policy schedule + the broker's contact details + the rebuild valuation
• Service charge accounts for the last three years
• Companies House records (filing history, current officers, registered office)
• Any Section 20 consultation files from past major works
• The reserve fund bank statement and any RCA / sinking fund schedule
• Lease and any deeds of variation
• Any contractor contracts currently in force

If anything on that list is missing or "not sure where it is", that is what you need to fix first. The cost of replacing the work where the documentation has been lost is significantly more than the cost of finding it.

Where new RMC directors most commonly come unstuck

Three patterns repeat across the small blocks we work with:

1. Assuming the outgoing director or agent had it covered. Many self-managed blocks have an FRA from years ago that has not been reviewed, an EICR that is comfortably out of date, and an asbestos survey that does not exist for a pre-2000 building. There is rarely malice in this - the previous director simply did not know the regulations had moved.

2. Confusing "we have done it" with "we have evidence we did it". If something is not in writing it did not happen, as far as a regulator or a buyer's solicitor is concerned. Verbal assurances from a contractor that "it's all fine" are worth nothing in front of a tribunal.

3. Trying to do everything personally. Compliance work is delegable. Contractors do the assessments and inspections; you, as a director, are responsible for making sure they happen and that the evidence is on file. The job is not to be the fire risk assessor - it is to make sure there is a qualified one.

Three things to do this week

If you do nothing else after reading this:

1. Take ten minutes to compile the list of documents above into a single Drive or Dropbox folder. Even if half of it is "missing", knowing what is missing is the first useful piece of work.
2. Check your FRA date and your buildings insurance renewal date. These are the two items with the most consequence if they have lapsed.
3. Set up Companies House email reminders at gov.uk. Five minutes of work that removes the most common penalty.

Once those are done, the next step is a full compliance baseline - which is what the Modbury Remote Free Compliance Score does in sixty seconds.

If you want a properly bespoke audit, the Block Compliance Check goes deeper than the free version, with a video walkthrough or site visit by TPI and RICS qualified members of the team, a full compliance register for your block, and a templates pack covering Section 20 notices, AGM agendas, contractor briefs and the rest. From £149.

This article is general guidance for new RMC directors, not legal advice. If you have specific concerns about your block, please seek advice from a leasehold solicitor or the Leasehold Advisory Service (LEASE).