What usually happens
You do the right thing before the work starts. You knock on both sides, you mention it to the people opposite, and the builder puts a letter through the doors with the start date and a rough finish. For about a week, everybody is well informed.
Then the programme moves, as programmes do. The skip arrives on a Tuesday instead of the Thursday, and it takes the space the neighbour at number 12 parks in. The scaffold goes up two days early. The strip-out is louder than anybody expected, and it starts at eight rather than the half past eight the letter implied. None of these is a scandal, and none of them was told to anyone.
One of our jobs went like this. The builder was good, the job was busy, and he had not yet built any rapport with the street. A delivery driver damaged a neighbour's planter and a subcontractor left rubbish on the pavement, on an afternoon when the builder was off site and the men who were there spoke little English. The neighbour did not want to ask you for his number and hound him. She wanted somewhere to log it so that he could fix it when he could. He had a QR code on his hoarding, so she used it. He acknowledged it within the hour, gave her a time for both fixes, and posted them on the street's page so that everyone could see he had.
So the neighbours come to you, because you live there and the builder does not. You get a knock on Saturday morning about dust on a car, and a note through the door about the radio. You pass each one on to the builder by text, on your phone, in the evening, and you hope it was dealt with. On Friday you ask how it is going and get told it is all fine. When the neighbour asks you a fortnight later what happened about the dust, you genuinely do not know.
Nobody behaved badly there either. The builder probably did wash the car down. The neighbour did tell somebody. You were the switchboard between the two, and switchboards do not keep records.
One record, and what it costs
Everybody around the work is arguing about the past with no record of it, and a shared dated record settles the argument for all of them. Your neighbour can see that the report arrived. Your builder can show what they did about it. You can read both without being the middleman. It costs £5 per site per week, and neighbours join free.
How Noisy Neighbour works on a house
You set the site up with the address, the company doing the work and the working hours, then print the QR sheet and put it on the scaffold, the skip or the front of the property. Scanning it opens the public page. Your neighbours read it in a browser, with no password, and join with an email address if they want the notices sent to them.
Notices are posted once by whoever is running the day-to-day work, and go out by email to every neighbour who has joined as well as onto a calendar anyone with the link can see. On a domestic job the ones that matter are deliveries, skip collections, noisy work, and milestones such as the scaffold coming down. The hours a builder may work are set by your council under the Control of Pollution Act 1974 rather than by one national rule, so the hours on the page should be the ones your council allows, and our guide to building work hours explains the usual pattern.
A neighbour reports a problem by picking a category such as noise, dust or parking, describing it and adding a photo if they have one. The site team is notified straight away and replies in the same thread. Each issue keeps the time it was raised, acknowledged and resolved, and whether the neighbour confirmed that the fix worked, and the page shows the average response time and the average resolution time. You see all of it, which is what replaces asking how it is going.
Where this comes up
The full version of this scene, with what each person on the street can see, is on our page about building work on a house. Your builder's side of the same arrangement, and why most of them prefer no phone number on the hoarding, is on the page for builders. If the work touches a shared wall, the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 sets out the notices you owe the adjoining owner, and the site page is no substitute for them; it simply means that from the day work starts, your neighbour has somewhere to raise what they see and you have a record of what happened next.