What usually happens
The consultation came and went. You read the notices, you may have sent observations, and the works were going to be disruptive but necessary. Then the scaffold arrives outside the bedroom window and the grinding starts at ten to eight, and from that point nobody tells you anything.
You ring the managing agent's office. The person who answers is helpful and has no idea when the noise will stop, because they are in an office two miles away and the programme is on the contractor's laptop. They take a message. You ring again the following week and give the same account to somebody else. Nothing you have said has left a trace you can point to.
One resident on a block we worked on had her shower fail when the works isolated the riser. She rang, and nobody acknowledged it. She rang again a few days later, and a different person was not sure and would check. An email arrived the next day asking what exactly the problem was. She answered within the hour, and then it was the weekend. The first person picked up the next call, was shocked it had not been sorted, and booked an engineer before going on holiday. The engineer came without the right part. He came again the week after and she was out, because nobody had told her. Three weeks without a shower, a call log she could not see, two emails, and no way of showing any of it.
A month later you write properly, saying you have been raising this since the scaffold went up. The reply says the agent has no record of previous contact and that the contractor is working within permitted hours. You are now in an argument about whether you complained, which is not the argument you wanted to have, and the only evidence either side holds is its own memory of phone calls. If it goes further, the process expects dates: a tribunal dealing with service charges under section 20 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 works from what was asked and answered, and so does a redress scheme.
One record, and what it costs
Everyone in the block, and the agent, and the contractor, is arguing about the past with no record of it, and one shared dated record settles it for all of them at once. It protects you when you did report the dust three times, and it protects the agent who answered within a day. A block is billed on its dwellings, at £1 per dwelling per week, paid by whoever sets the site up; a single job on one house stays at £5 per site per week. Residents join free either way.
How Noisy Neighbour works for a resident
You scan the QR sheet in the lobby or follow the link. The page shows the company doing the work, the working hours and a calendar of notices for the weeks ahead. There is no password and nothing to install. Joining with an email address means the notices come to you and you can report a problem and follow the reply.
To report something you pick a category such as noise, dust or parking, describe it and add a photo if you have one. The site team is notified straight away and answers in the same thread. The issue keeps the time it was raised, the time it was acknowledged, the time it was marked resolved and your answer to whether the fix worked, and the page shows the average response time and the average resolution time across the site, so you can see what a promise of a quick reply has meant in practice on this block.
If your landlord is a social landlord, the Housing Ombudsman will ask what you reported and when before it looks at anything else. A managing agent has to belong to a redress scheme under the 2014 redress schemes order, and that scheme will ask the same question. A dated log does not win the argument for you, but it means the argument starts in the right place.
Asking your agent or board to set one up
Send this to the managing agent, the RTM directors or the residents' association. It is short on purpose, and it costs them very little to say yes to.
Dear [name of agent or board],
During the major works at [the address] it has been difficult to find out
what is planned each week, and there is no shared record of the problems
residents raise or the replies they get. I asked about [the issue you raised]
on [the date] and I do not think there is a record of it.
Could we have a site page for the works: a public page for [the address]
with the working hours, a calendar of upcoming noisy work, deliveries and
skips, and a way to report a problem that logs when it was raised, when it
was acknowledged and when it was resolved. It costs a few pounds a week per
dwelling, residents join free, and it would give all of us the same record.
I am happy to help set it up or to explain it to other residents.
[your name], flat [number], [the address]
Where this comes up
The full scene, and what the agent, the contractor and an RTM board each see, is on our page about major works on a block. If you rent from a housing association, the same arrangement on an estate programme is on the page about housing association estate works. The agent's own reasons for wanting the record are set out on the page for managing agents.