What usually happens
A neighbour catches whoever is nearest the gate at half past four on a Friday. It is often not the site manager, because the site manager is on the telephone to a supplier. The message is that dust has been coming through an open window all afternoon and a line of washing is ruined. The person who hears it says they will pass it on, and means it, while carrying a length of timber in the other hand.
By Monday the message has not survived the weekend. The neighbour comes back, less patient than they were, and asks for whoever is in charge. The site manager, who has heard nothing about Friday, apologises and says it is the first he has heard of it. That is true, and it is close to the worst thing he can say, because the neighbour now believes the first complaint was ignored on purpose.
This is the point at which a complaint changes shape. It stops being about dust and becomes about not being listened to, and the second version is much harder to settle than the first. On block jobs we have arrived for a fix and found nobody in, more than once, because the management company had shifted the schedule and told the resident nothing, and then been the contractor who never turned up. What we wanted was to see the issue as it was raised, reach the person who raised it, get to the job and leave evidence that it was done. A fortnight later the neighbour has stopped talking to the site altogether and started writing to the council, and an environmental health officer is on the telephone asking what arrangements are in place for keeping residents informed.
Nobody in that sequence behaved badly. The neighbour raised the problem twice. The labourer meant to pass it on. The site manager would have moved the cutting station on the Friday if he had known. The only thing that went wrong is that nothing was written down, so the site cannot show that it responded and the neighbour cannot show that they asked.
The checklist
- Acknowledge the complaint the same day, in writing if you can, even when you have no answer yet, because the acknowledgement is what stops the complaint escalating while you work out what to do.
- Record who raised it, when they raised it, and what they actually said, in their words rather than your summary of them.
- Find out what is really causing it before you promise anything, because the complaint is usually about one machine, one hour of the day or one lorry rather than the whole job.
- Fix what can be fixed that day, and say plainly what cannot be fixed and why, along with when the noisy part of the work will be finished.
- Reply with a photograph of the change you made, because a picture of the new screen or the moved cutting station does more than a paragraph describing it.
- Ask the neighbour to confirm that the fix worked, and record their answer, since an unconfirmed fix is only your opinion that the problem has gone.
- Give the neighbour the hours the site works and a note of what is coming in the next week or two, so that the next loud morning is expected rather than a fresh shock.
- Keep the whole sequence, dated, for the rest of the job, because it is your defence if the complaint is later described to the council or a solicitor as having been ignored.
Where a complaint can go next
Construction noise is controlled by the local authority rather than by a single national rule. Under section 60 of the Control of Pollution Act 1974 a council can serve a notice on the people carrying out the works that sets requirements about how the work is done, which plant may be used and the hours it may be used in, and contravening that notice is an offence. A contractor can also go the other way and apply in advance for prior consent under section 61, agreeing the method and the hours with the council before starting. Our guide to what hours builders can work covers the pattern most councils use, and our page on Section 61 sites covers what the liaison condition on a consent is asking for.
There is a second route. Noise and dust from premises can amount to a statutory nuisance under section 79 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, and where a council is satisfied that one exists or is likely to occur it must serve an abatement notice under section 80. Both regimes turn partly on whether the site took the practicable steps that were open to it, which is a question about what you did and when you did it. Whether the best practicable means defence is open to a small domestic site is a question for advice on your own facts, not something to take from a web page.
What both routes have in common is that they are decided on evidence. The officer is not looking for an argument about whether the neighbour is reasonable. They are looking for what was reported, when it was acknowledged, and what the site changed as a result.
A reply you can send on the day
This is the shape of a reply that ends most complaints. It acknowledges the problem, says what has changed, says what has not, and gives the neighbour somewhere to go next time.
Dear neighbour,
Thank you for telling us about the dust from the cutting yesterday
afternoon. You are right that it was worse than it should have been,
and we are sorry about the washing.
We have moved the cutting station to the rear of the site and put a
screen up behind it. The photograph attached shows what has changed.
The cutting that is left is booked for Thursday morning and we will
damp it down as we go.
If it happens again, please tell us on the day and we will come and
look at it. Our working hours and the notices for the next fortnight
are on the site page, and you can report anything else there too.
With apologies,
The site team
Send it, and keep a copy with the date on it. The copy is the point.
One record, and what it costs
Everybody in the Friday-afternoon scene would be better off with a written trail, and that includes the neighbour who is convinced they were ignored. A shared, dated record of what was reported, when it was acknowledged and what was done about it settles the argument for the site, for the neighbour and for the officer who ends up fielding it, because all three are reading the same record rather than three different recollections. On Noisy Neighbour that record costs £5 per site per week, and neighbours join free.
How Noisy Neighbour works on a site like this
Each site gets a public web page and a printable QR sheet for the hoarding or the front of the property. Scanning it shows the company doing the work, the working hours and the notices for the weeks ahead. Neighbours install nothing and there is no login for them. Neighbours who want the notices by email join the page with an email address, and there is no limit on how many join.
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. The types are the ones that cause the complaints in the first place: noisy work, deliveries, skips and waste collections, milestones such as the scaffold going up or coming down, and utility interruptions. A notice posted on Monday about Thursday's cutting turns Thursday from an ambush into an inconvenience.
A neighbour reports a problem by choosing a category, describing it and adding a photograph if it helps. The site team is notified straight away and replies in the same thread, with photographs of its own. 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 across the job. The page shows the company name and the working hours, and no telephone number, so nobody is taking calls at the gate. Our page for builders has the rest of the site team's side of this, and building work on a house covers the same street from the homeowner's and the neighbour's point of view.