What usually happens
The award lands, and both owners are relieved. The building owner has been waiting four months to start. The adjoining owner has read a document written for surveyors, has a schedule of condition with photographs of their own cracks in it, and understands roughly that they cannot stop the work and that they will be compensated if it damages anything. Then the correspondence stops, because the process it belonged to is finished.
Work starts. The adjoining owner hears the scaffold go up, hears the breaking out, and has no idea whether what they are hearing is the work the award described or something else. The one point of contact they had was their surveyor, whom they are conscious of having paid for by proxy, and who they assume is not there to answer a question about what day the skip is coming. So they wait, and count things, and get quietly angrier through August. On our jobs the award has usually provided for inspections during the works, and it is the provision most often left unused. Nobody rings the adjoining owner's surveyor to arrange one, because nobody has been told it is their job to, and so the adjoining owner's first contact with anyone is when something has already gone wrong.
In the fifth month something concrete happens. A crack appears above a door, or the scaffold arrives across a boundary the award did not mention, or the work starts at seven in the morning on a Saturday. The adjoining owner now contacts their surveyor, for the first time since the award, with a complaint that has five months of accumulated grievance behind it and no dates attached to any of it. The building owner's account is that everything has been done properly and that nothing was ever raised with them.
The surveyors are now being asked to settle a dispute in which neither owner can evidence their own account. Nobody was keeping a record, so what the surveyors receive is two recollections of the same summer. That is the point at which a job that had a perfectly good award becomes expensive.
What the award actually settles
An award made under section 10 of the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 determines the right to carry out the notifiable work, the time and manner of carrying it out, and any other matter arising out of or incidental to the dispute, including the costs of making the award. It usually comes with a schedule of the adjoining property's condition, taken before the works, so that later damage can be compared with it. Either owner may appeal to the county court within fourteen days of the award being served on them, and if neither does the award is conclusive between them.
What an award is not is a description of the job. It covers the notifiable work, not the whole building project, and it is a fixed document rather than a running one. It does not tell the adjoining owner which fortnight the noise is in, when the concrete is being poured, whether the skip on the road is coming back, or what the working hours are for the parts of the job that are nothing to do with the party wall. Our guide to the hours builders can work covers where those come from, and they come from the council, not from the award.
What the surveyors still do
The appointed surveyors do not walk away when the award is served. Their appointment under section 10 cannot simply be rescinded, and where a dispute arises between the owners about a matter connected with work to which the Act relates, that is precisely what the section 10 machinery is for, including referring the point to the third surveyor. In practice a new matter arising during the works is often dealt with by a further award covering the new point, with its own costs to be allocated.
It is worth being careful about what that does not amount to. The Act does not make an appointed surveyor a site supervisor or an inspector, and it does not require inspections during the works. Whether a surveyor attends site as the job goes on, and how often, depends on what the award provides and what the owners are paying for. In our experience awards commonly do provide for them, and the provision is patchily kept. The surveyors should see that the conditions the award asks for are met, particularly as they bear on the structure, and that is usually carried out through the surveyors themselves. But it falls to the building owner or the contractor to make it happen, by reaching out to the adjoining owner or their surveyor and arranging the visit.
The one thing that is consistent is what the surveyors need when they are called in: a sequence of dates. What was raised, when, by whom, what the building owner did about it, and what condition things were in at each point. A surveyor who has that can deal with the matter. A surveyor who is given two accounts and no dates is being asked to arbitrate between memories, which costs both owners money and takes weeks.
What the adjoining owner is entitled to
Two duties in section 7 of the Act matter more during the works than they do at the award stage. The building owner must not cause unnecessary inconvenience to the adjoining owner or occupier in exercising the rights the Act gives, and the building owner must compensate the adjoining owner and occupier for loss or damage resulting from the works. Both are worded in a way that depends on what actually happened on site.
That is the practical reason an adjoining owner should write things down as the job goes on rather than at the end. A complaint about unnecessary inconvenience is a claim about specific days. A claim for loss or damage is compared against the schedule of condition and the photographs, and it is easier to make when the crack was reported the week it appeared than when it is first mentioned in November. The full Act is on legislation.gov.uk as the Party Wall etc. Act 1996.
One record, and what it costs
The building owner who did everything properly, the adjoining owner who spent five months not knowing what was happening, and the two surveyors who are now being paid to reconstruct it are all missing the same thing, and each of them would be better off with it. A shared, dated record of what was planned, what was raised and what was done settles the question for all four, because it is one record rather than four accounts of it. On Noisy Neighbour it costs £5 per site per week, and neighbours join free.
How Noisy Neighbour works alongside an award
None of this is part of the statutory process and none of it changes an award. It sits underneath the award, covering the months the award is silent about. The site gets a public web page and a printable QR sheet for the hoarding or the front of the property, showing the company doing the work, the working hours and the notices for the weeks ahead. The adjoining owner installs nothing and needs no login, and can join with an email address to get the notices.
Notices are posted once by the site team, emailed to everyone who has joined and shown on a calendar anyone with the link can see: noisy work, deliveries, skips and waste collections, milestones such as the scaffold going up or coming down, and utility interruptions. For an adjoining owner, that is the answer to the question the award does not address, which is what is happening to them and when.
An adjoining owner reports a problem by choosing a category, describing it and adding a photograph, which is exactly what a surveyor would want if the matter ever reaches them. The site team is notified straight away and replies in the same thread. Every issue records who raised it, when it was raised, when it was acknowledged, when it was resolved and whether the neighbour confirmed the fix, and the page shows the average response time and the average resolution time. The history is kept for the life of the site. Our page for party wall surveyors sets out the surveyor's view of that record, and building work on a house covers the rest of the street.