Taking back control of a Residents Management Company, a case study, pt 6

Even if one doesn't know who the members of the RMC are, knowing an upper bound on how many of them there could be is itself useful: if five percent of the voting members of a company demand a general meeting, then the directors must call one, or those members can call it themselves.

It follows that if, say, there is an RMC with 400 members, and a group of residents decide that they wish to call a general meeting to appoint new directors, they need to find 20 signatures of those members. But if they've underestimated the total size, at, say, 300 members, they'll think they only need 15 signatures. After the deadline for calling the meeting has passed and they have heard nothing, they won't know if they heard nothing because they didn't have enough signatures, or because the directors were ignoring them.

So obtaining access to the membership register can still be essential. Tiresomely, some companies try to pretend that GDPR is somehow a way of getting out of their statutory obligations to disclose the members of the company to anyone who makes a valid request for that information (and I have even known one company to falsify the information provided - but this is heading into criminal territory).