What usually happens
The first neighbour arrives at the gate on the second morning, because the generator started before the hours on the notice and they have a baby asleep upstairs. Whoever is nearest to the gate talks to them. That conversation is often perfectly good: somebody moves the generator, the neighbour goes home, and nothing about it is written down anywhere.
Then the number on the hoarding starts ringing. It goes to the office, or to the site manager's mobile, and it rings at twenty past six and on Sunday afternoon, because a hoarding does not show working hours for phone calls. The person who picks it up is rarely the person who can do anything about the problem, so the message is passed on by voice, and the neighbour hears nothing back and assumes nobody cared.
We have run the friendly version of this street. Every neighbour was pleasant, every one of them had lived through a bad build before, and all of them wanted to know when the wait-and-load lorry was coming and when the skip was going. Ten minutes of traffic did not spoil anybody's day. A surprise did. What they needed from us was a structured way to hear about the big movements, and a way to ask about the small ones that did not mean the street's group chat filling up with questions for a builder who was not in it.
Weeks later an environmental health officer rings the site manager, because the same neighbour has gone to the council. The officer wants to know what was reported and what was done. The site manager remembers moving the generator and remembers a conversation about dust, but cannot say which day either happened, and has nothing to send. The council now has one account of events, and it is not yours. Working hours are set by each council under the Control of Pollution Act 1974, which also gives them the power to serve a Section 60 notice on how the work is carried out, so this is not a conversation you want to have from memory.
Nobody in that sequence behaved badly. The team did move the generator. The neighbour did report the dust. Neither of them can prove any of it, which is the whole of the problem.
One record, and what it costs
Everyone standing around a building site is arguing about the past without a record of it, and a shared dated record settles the argument for all of them at once. The neighbour can see that the report went somewhere. You can show what you did and when. The client can look for themselves instead of ringing you on a Friday. It costs £5 per site per week, and neighbours join free.
How Noisy Neighbour works on site
You print the QR sheet and fix it to the hoarding, the gate or the front of the property. Scanning it opens the site's public page, which shows the company doing the work, the working hours and the notices for the weeks ahead. There is no password, nothing to install and no phone number on the page.
Notices are posted once by the site team. Each one is emailed to every neighbour who has joined the page and shown on a calendar anyone with the link can read. The types are the ones that actually cause trouble: noisy work, deliveries, skips and waste collections, milestones such as the scaffold going up or coming down, and utility interruptions.
A neighbour reports a problem by picking a category, describing it and adding a photo if they have one. The team is notified straight away and answers in the same thread. Each issue records who raised it, when it was raised, when it was acknowledged, when it was resolved and whether the neighbour confirmed the fix, and the page shows the average response time and the average resolution time. That is the part that protects you, and it is also the part that will show a slow week honestly, so it is worth agreeing who watches the page before the first notice goes up.
Where this comes up
On a domestic job the record mostly keeps the street and the client out of your inbox, which is the builder's side of a house extension. On a Section 61 site it is evidence of the liaison arrangements you offered in the application, ready to show at a monitoring visit, which is the contractor's side of a Section 61 site. On major works to a block, it moves the daily resident calls from the managing agent's office to the people who can answer them, described in the contractor's section of the managed-block page. If you want the practical drill for handling a complaint well, our guide to a neighbour complaining about your building work sets it out step by step. Sites registered with the Considerate Constructors Scheme will recognise most of this from the Code of Considerate Practice on respecting the community; the page gives a monitor something dated to look at, and nothing here implies any relationship with the scheme.