What usually happens
A letter comes through the door before the work starts, or somebody knocks. The dates in it are honest and approximate. For the first week everything matches what you were told.
Then the skip turns up on the Tuesday in the space you park in. The scaffold goes up early and the bathroom window is now looking at a board. The strip-out starts before eight, which is a genuine problem if you work nights. Each of these is small, and each of them you found out about by walking outside.
One of our jobs went exactly like this for the neighbour opposite. A delivery driver damaged her planter and a subcontractor left rubbish on the pavement, on an afternoon when the builder was off site and the men there spoke little English. She did not want to ask the homeowner for a phone number and start hounding a builder she did not know. There was a QR code on the hoarding, so she used that instead. The report cost her nothing, the builder acknowledged it that afternoon with a time for both fixes, and posted the fix on the street's page for the rest of the road to see.
So you go and ask. Whoever is nearest the gate is perfectly pleasant, tells you it will be finished by Thursday, and may well tell somebody. Or you ring the number on the hoarding and get an office that takes a message. A week later the same thing happens again, and this time you are the neighbour who has complained twice, which is a role nobody wants, and you cannot show you were reasonable both times.
If it does not improve, the hours are the thing you can hold a site to. Councils set working hours under the Control of Pollution Act 1974 and can serve a notice under section 60 controlling how the work is carried out, and persistent noise can also be dealt with as a statutory nuisance under sections 79 and 80 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990. You report it through your council, and the first question you will be asked is what you raised with the site and when. The hours differ borough by borough. Westminster and Southwark allow Saturday mornings, Kensington and Chelsea allows no noisy work at weekends at all, and our guide to working hours links each borough's own page, which is the one that applies to you.
One record, and what it costs
Everybody around a building site is arguing about the past with no record of it, and one shared dated record settles the argument for all of them at once. It shows the builder answering you within the hour, and it shows the fortnight when nobody answered at all. The site pays £5 per site per week, and neighbours join free.
How Noisy Neighbour works for a neighbour
There is a QR sheet on the hoarding, the scaffold or the front of the property. You scan it, or follow the link, and the site's public page opens in your browser. It shows the company doing the work, the working hours and a calendar of what is coming. There is no password and nothing to install.
If you join with an email address, the notices come to you: noisy work, deliveries, skips and waste collections, milestones such as the scaffold going up or coming down, and utility interruptions. That is the part that removes the surprises, because a concrete pour you knew about a week ago is a different experience from one that starts outside your window on a Saturday morning.
To report a problem you pick a category such as noise, dust or parking, describe it, and add a photo if you have one. The site team is told straight away and replies in the same thread. Your report keeps the time you raised it, the time it was acknowledged and the time it was marked resolved, and you are asked whether the fix actually worked. The page also shows the average response time and the average resolution time for that site.
The message to send
Put this through the door, hand it to the site manager or send it to whoever is having the work done. It asks for something that costs very little, and it is easier to say yes to than a complaint.
Hello,
I live at [your address], next to the work at [the address of the site].
I am not complaining, and I would rather not have to. What I do not have is
any way of knowing what is planned each week, or anywhere to raise something
small before it becomes a problem. Last week [the thing that happened] took
me by surprise.
Would you set up a site page for the job. It is a public web page for the
site with your company name, the working hours and a calendar of upcoming
noisy work, deliveries and skip collections, and it lets neighbours report a
problem so you can see it and reply. Every report keeps the time it was
raised and the time it was dealt with, which protects you as much as it
helps me. It costs a few pounds a week and it is free for neighbours to use.
I am happy to tell the rest of the street about it once it is up.
[your name], [your address]
Where this comes up
The longer version of the scene above, with what the homeowner and the builder each see, is on our page about building work on a house. Our guide to building work hours covers what your council is likely to allow. If you are the one having the work done, read how to tell neighbours about building work and the page for homeowners.