What usually happens
An applicant applies for prior consent under section 61 of the Control of Pollution Act 1974. The method statement is thorough about plant, hours and screening, and the section on neighbour liaison says that a letter will be delivered to properties within an agreed radius before works begin, that a site contact will be available during working hours, and that a newsletter will follow. Consent is granted on those terms, and the terms are reasonable.
Then the works start. The letter may well have gone out. The contact number may well be answered. Neither of those is visible from an office, and neither is visible to the officer who visits the site in month four.
Kensington and Chelsea's own Section 61 form shows how open the requirement is. Its liaison item asks the applicant to detail arrangements for liaison with neighbours, businesses and schools, and offers as its example a community relations manager, a project email and hotline, newsletters, and the thought that a development "may even consider setting up a website". An applicant can meet that with a paragraph, and most do. Nothing later in the process asks for evidence that the paragraph was true.
What the team sees instead is the complaints. A resident rings environmental health because the piling started before the permitted hour, and the officer takes the details, then telephones the site manager to pass them on. The site manager deals with it, or says they will. Nothing about that exchange is written down in a way the resident can see, so a fortnight later the resident rings again about the same thing and the officer repeats the process. The council has become the neighbour liaison arrangement it asked the applicant to provide, and the officer's time is being spent as a message service rather than on the sites that are genuinely out of order.
The tools for the sites that are out of order are already there: a Section 60 notice on how the work is carried out, and the statutory nuisance powers in sections 79 and 80 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990. What is missing is the ordinary evidence that would let an officer tell a badly run site from a well run one without visiting it.
One record, and what it costs
Everybody around one of these sites is arguing about the past with no record of it, including the officer holding the complaint, and one shared dated record settles the argument for all of them at once. The applicant who does answer within the day can show it, and the applicant who does not is shown not doing it. It costs the applicant £5 per site per week, residents join free, and it costs the council nothing.
How Noisy Neighbour works on a consented site
The contractor prints the QR sheet and fixes it to the hoarding. 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 and nothing to install, so a resident, a head teacher or an officer reads the same page.
Notices are posted once by the site team, emailed to every neighbour who has joined and shown on a calendar anyone with the link can read. The types match what a method statement usually promises to warn people about: noisy work, deliveries, skips and waste collections, milestones such as the scaffold going up or coming down, and utility interruptions.
A resident reports a problem by picking a category, describing it and adding a photo if useful. The site team is notified straight away and replies 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 resident confirmed the fix worked, and the page shows the average response time and the average resolution time for the site. That is the material an officer would otherwise be assembling from telephone calls, and it is also what an applicant can attach to the next application as evidence that the last one's arrangements were real.
Where this comes up
Practice varies between boroughs, both in what the form asks about liaison and in how consent is monitored, so the useful reading is our page about what neighbour liaison on a Section 61 site should look like alongside your own guidance. We have also written a plain explanation of Section 61 prior consent, including how it differs from a Section 60 notice, for the applicants and residents who arrive asking. The contractor's side of the same arrangement is on the page for builders.