What usually happens
The notices go out, the dissent comes back, surveyors are appointed and the award is served with the schedule of condition attached. Everybody has been careful and correct. Then the builder starts, and the adjoining owner's only source of information about the work on the other side of their wall is whatever they can hear through it.
Nothing happens for six weeks, in the sense that nothing is reported. The adjoining owner does notice the vibration during the underpinning, and does wonder whether the hours are what the award said, and does mention it to the builder's labourer on the pavement one morning. None of that reaches anyone who writes things down.
In our experience the award usually provides for inspections during the works, and it is the provision most often left unused. The surveyors are there to see the award's conditions met, the condition of the structure above all, but whether an inspection happens comes down to whether the building owner or the contractor reaches out to the adjoining owner or their surveyor and arranges it. On the jobs where nobody does, the first time the adjoining owner's surveyor hears anything is when the crack appears.
Then a crack appears in the return wall of the back bedroom, or the adjoining owner comes home to find the scaffold has been standing on their side for a fortnight. Now they ring the surveyor, who asks what the builder said when it was raised, and the answer is that it was raised with a labourer. The building owner's account is that the adjoining owner has never complained about anything until today. Both are describing the same six weeks and neither has a document from it, so the work of establishing what actually happened falls to you, at the point when the two owners have stopped speaking to each other.
The Act is designed to keep this from turning into litigation: the resolution of a dispute sits with the appointed surveyors under section 10 of the Party Wall etc. Act 1996, and section 7 requires the building owner not to cause unnecessary inconvenience to the adjoining owner and to compensate for loss or damage. Both of those are easier to apply when there is a record of what happened week by week.
One record, and what it costs
Every person on a party wall job is arguing about the past without a record of it, and one shared dated record settles the argument for all of them at once. It cuts both ways, which is the point: it will show the building owner giving proper notice of the noisy week, and it will show the fortnight of silence after the adjoining owner reported the scaffold. It costs £5 per site per week, paid by whoever sets the site up, and neighbours join free.
How Noisy Neighbour works on a job under an award
The builder or the building owner prints the QR sheet and puts it on the hoarding, the scaffold 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. The adjoining owner reads it in a browser with no password, and joins with an email address if they want the notices sent to them.
Notices are posted once and reach every neighbour who has joined, as well as a calendar anyone with the link can see. On a job under an award the useful ones are the noisy phases, the deliveries, the skips and the milestones, such as the scaffold going up on the boundary or coming down again.
When the adjoining owner reports something they pick a category, describe it and add a photo if they have one. 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 adjoining owner confirmed the fix, and the page shows the average response time and the average resolution time. If you are appointed to resolve a dispute afterwards, that is the sequence you would otherwise be reconstructing from memory.
Where this comes up
We have written the longer version of the scene above as a guide to what happens after the party wall award. The domestic job the award usually sits inside, seen from the street, is on our page about building work on a house, and the building owner's side of the arrangement is on the page for homeowners. On larger works where the council has also given prior consent for the noise, the same record does two jobs at once, which is set out on our page about Section 61 sites.