How a site ends up with one
Notices are almost never the first thing that happens. A resident rings the council about a breaker that started before eight, an officer asks the site to keep to the hours, and for a fortnight it does. Then a slab has to come out before a delivery slot, the subcontractor who does it was never told the hours, and the same resident rings again, this time with a list of dates.
At that point the officer has a choice between another conversation and a notice. What decides it is usually not the noise level. It is whether anyone on site appears to be accountable for the noise, and whether the officer can see that the last complaint was dealt with. We have had the warning rather than the notice, on a job where the breaking-out kept starting before eight because the subcontractor doing it had never been told the hours, and the neighbour two doors down had rung the council three times before anyone on our side heard about it. The officer's call was polite and clear. What we changed was not the plant. We moved the breaking-out into the permitted window, put the hours on the hoarding where they could be read from the pavement, named one person the street could reach, and kept a note of every call from then on, because the next conversation with the council was going to be about what we had done, not what we had meant to do.
Contractors are often taken by surprise because the complaints never reached them. A neighbour who has telephoned a number on a hoarding twice and got nobody will go to the council the third time, and the site manager first hears about the problem from an environmental health officer weeks after it started. The site has no account of the complaint, because it never received it, and no way to show what it would have done.
What the notice can require
Section 60(3) lists what a notice may specify. It may specify the plant or machinery that is or is not to be used, the hours during which the works may be carried out, and the level of noise that may be emitted from the premises in question, from a specified point on them, or during specified hours. It may also make provision for any change in circumstances, which is how a notice covers a programme that changes as the job goes on.
Beyond the limits themselves, section 60(6) allows the notice to specify the time within which it must be complied with and to require the execution of works and the taking of any other steps necessary to comply. That is the provision behind a requirement to put up an acoustic screen, to move a generator, or to change a method of breaking out concrete.
What the council has to consider
The council is not free to write whatever it likes. Section 60(4) requires it to have regard to any relevant approved code of practice, to the need to ensure that the best practicable means are used to minimise the noise, to the desirability, before specifying particular methods or plant, of specifying other methods or plant that would be acceptable to the person served, and to the need to protect people in the neighbourhood from the effects of the noise.
Those four considerations are the ground on which a notice is usually negotiated or appealed. The approved code for construction sites in England is British Standard 5228, approved for England by the order at SI 2015/227, and best practicable means is defined in section 72. A notice that specifies a method when a quieter method acceptable to the contractor was available is vulnerable on its own terms.
Who is served
Under section 60(5) the notice goes to the person who appears to the council to be carrying out or about to carry out the works, and on such other people as appear to be responsible for or to have control over them. On a house extension that can mean both the builder and the homeowner receive it, which is a surprise to most homeowners. On a larger scheme it can reach the principal contractor, a specialist subcontractor and the developer together.
How to answer a notice
Read the requirements against the programme first, and separate what the site can do from what it cannot. Most notices are complied with rather than fought, because their terms are close to what the borough publishes anyway and the cost of an appeal exceeds the cost of moving a generator.
Where a requirement genuinely cannot be met, there are twenty-one days from service to appeal to a magistrates' court under section 60(7). The grounds of appeal and the powers of the court are set out in the Control of Noise (Appeals) Regulations 1975. Talking to the officer who served it is worth doing in parallel, because a notice can be varied by agreement more quickly than it can be appealed.
Then tell the neighbours. A notice exists because people around the site were affected, and a site that changes its methods without saying so gets no credit for it. A short account of what has changed, sent to the people who complained, is the cheapest part of the response.
What happens if it is breached
Contravening a requirement of the notice without reasonable excuse is an offence under section 60(8), and section 74 sets the penalty on summary conviction at a fine at level five on the standard scale, with a further daily fine for each day the offence continues after the conviction.
A separate route runs alongside it. Noise that amounts to a statutory nuisance is dealt with by an abatement notice under section 80 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, and an individual can bring proceedings themselves under section 82 without waiting for the council. Complying with a Section 60 notice does not by itself answer a statutory nuisance claim.
How to avoid one
Agree the terms before the council imposes them. A prior consent under section 61 lets the contractor propose the hours, the methods and the noise limits, and working in accordance with a consent is a defence to a prosecution for breaching a Section 60 notice. Our guide to Section 61 prior consent explains what an application has to contain and how five London boroughs handle it.
The other half is the part that is not written into the Act. Councils serve notices where noise is uncontrolled and nobody appears to be answering for it. A site that acknowledges a complaint the day it arrives, fixes what can be fixed and can show what it did has a completely different conversation with an environmental health officer from one that has no account of the last three months. Our builder's checklist for a neighbour complaining about your building work sets out that sequence.
Why the record decides these cases
Look at what every stage of this process actually turns on. The officer deciding whether to serve a notice is weighing whether complaints were handled. The contractor considering an appeal wants to show what it changed and when. The resident who rings the council for a third time is reciting dates from memory, and the site is denying them from memory. Nobody in the dispute is arguing about the noise: they are arguing about what happened, weeks ago, with nothing either side can check. A shared, dated record of what was announced, what was reported and when it was resolved settles it for all three of them at once. On Noisy Neighbour it costs £5 per site per week, and neighbours join free.
How Noisy Neighbour works on a site under notice
Each site gets a public web page. A printable QR sheet goes on the hoarding or the front of the property, and scanning it opens the page, which shows the company doing the work, the hours that apply to that site and the notices coming up. There is no password and nothing for a neighbour to install. Where a notice has fixed the hours, those are the hours the page shows, which is often the first time the people affected have seen them stated.
Notices are posted once by the site team, emailed to every neighbour who has joined the page, and shown on a calendar anyone with the link can see, covering noisy work, deliveries, skips and waste collections, milestones such as the scaffold going up or coming down, and utility interruptions. Announcing a noisy day in advance is the single thing most likely to stop a complaint becoming a call to the council.
A neighbour reports a problem by choosing a category, describing it and adding a photo if useful. The site team is notified straight away and replies in the same thread, and 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, with the average response and resolution times shown on the page. If an officer asks what the site did about the complaints of the last three months, that record is the answer, and the same record shows the resident whether they were dealt with or not.