What usually happens
A planned maintenance or retrofit programme is a long thing. Scaffold goes up on one block while another is still being surveyed, the same contractor is on the estate for the better part of a year, and the works are being run to a programme that changes every fortnight for reasons the residents never hear. The letter that went out before the start described phases and quarters. It did not say that the drilling on the third floor starts on Tuesday.
A resident hears the drilling and rings the repairs line, because that is the number on the fridge. The call is logged. The person taking it is not on the estate, does not have the contractor's programme, and cannot say when the noise will stop, so the resident is told that it has been passed on. Something may well happen next. The resident has no way of knowing whether it did, and neither does the person who took the call.
We have seen the landlord's side of this from the council's end too. Tenants keep complaining about the housing association. The association produces its evidence and the tenant produces theirs, each side clears its own name, and nobody is any happier. The residents who get heard are the loudest, and the vulnerable ones, who ring least and complain last, are washed out by them. Nobody can appraise what was actually acknowledged and resolved, or see a trend across cases, so nobody knows which contractors are performing and which teams need support.
Three weeks later the same resident has rung four times, spoken to four people and told the story four times. The fourth person can see three previous entries on the system, each a line of free text, none of them saying what the contractor did. The resident is now angry about not being listened to rather than about the drilling, which is a harder problem to fix and a much more expensive one. If it becomes a formal complaint, the landlord has to reconstruct four months of events from call notes and an inbox.
Nobody in this is behaving badly. The repairs line logged everything it was designed to log. The contractor did put a laminated sheet on the door of the block. The resident did raise it, four times, through the only route they could find. What is missing is the one thing that would have settled it: a record all three of them could read, with times on it, showing what was reported and what happened next.
Residents
Residents on an estate during a works programme have the least power of anyone in this situation. They did not choose the contractor, they are not paying for the works directly in most cases, and the route for raising a problem is a general line that handles everything from a broken boiler to a blocked drain. What they can do is make sure that what they raise is written down somewhere with a date on it.
On the site page a resident sees the company doing the work, the working hours and a calendar of notices: noisy work, deliveries, skips and waste collections, milestones such as scaffold up and scaffold down, and interruptions to water or power. Reporting a problem means choosing a category, describing it and adding a photo if it helps. The site team is notified straight away and replies in the same thread, so the answer comes from the people on the estate rather than from a call centre that has to pass it on.
Every report carries the time it was raised, the time it was acknowledged and the time it was resolved, and the resident is asked whether the fix actually worked. The page shows the average response and resolution times for the site, so what the landlord's standard has meant in practice here is visible rather than promised. A report on the page is not a formal complaint, and most things never need to become one, but if a resident does take a complaint to their landlord they take a sequence of dates rather than an account of four phone calls. Our page for residents in a managed block covers what to do with a record like that.
The housing association
For the landlord the problem is not any single report. It is that a programme running across a dozen blocks produces its complaints in a dozen places, and none of them holds what the contractor did. Repairs systems record calls. Inboxes record emails. Neither records the reply that resolved the thing, because the reply happened on site.
A page per site, all of them set up or held by the landlord, gives one log across the programme. Every report on every block carries the time it was raised, the time it was acknowledged and the time it was closed, which means the landlord can see how the contractor is performing while the works are running rather than at the end. That is useful when a report needs chasing, and it is useful in the next contract. The Housing Ombudsman's Complaint Handling Code requires a complaint to be acknowledged, defined and logged within five working days of being received and a full stage one response within ten working days of that acknowledgement, and it requires a full record of the complaint and the outcome at each stage. A works record does not satisfy the Code, which is about the landlord's own complaints procedure. What it does is keep most reports from ever reaching that procedure, and give the landlord the facts when one does.
The record cuts both ways, and a landlord should want it to. It will show that a noise report raised on Tuesday morning was answered on Tuesday afternoon with a photograph of the screening. It will equally show a report that sat untouched for nine days, and the resident will be able to see that as clearly as the landlord can. A landlord that responds to the standard it publishes is better off with that on paper than with a resident's account of it; a landlord that does not will find out from the log rather than from the Ombudsman. Leaseholders on the estate who are paying towards the works have their own consultation rights under section 20 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, which our guide to Section 20 major works communication explains; that consultation finishes before the scaffold goes up, and the record is what covers the months after it.
The contractor
For the contractor on an estate, the page is where notices go and where reports arrive. A notice about a water interruption on Thursday is posted once, emailed to every resident who has joined and shown on a calendar anyone with the link can see. It does not depend on a laminated sheet surviving on a door, and the contractor can point to the day it was posted.
Reports arriving through the page reach the site team instead of the repairs line, which means they reach people who can act on them the same day and who know what the programme says about tomorrow. The public page carries the company name and the working hours and no phone number, so nobody is fielding calls at the gate. Every reply is dated and can carry a photograph, which is the difference between saying a matter was dealt with and showing it. Our guide to a neighbour complaining about your building work sets out the order to do things in, and our page for builders covers the site team's side.
One record for residents and the landlord
The resident who has rung four times, the officer reading four lines of free text, and the site manager who fixed the thing in an afternoon and told nobody are all arguing about the past with no record of it. One shared, dated record of the notices, the reports and the replies answers it for all three, because it is the same record for each of them and none of them has to be believed. On Noisy Neighbour each site is billed on its dwellings, at £1 per dwelling per week; a single job on one site stays at £5 per site per week. Residents join free either way.
How Noisy Neighbour works on an estate programme
Whoever sets the page up, the landlord or the contractor, prints the QR sheet and puts it on the hoarding, in the entrance of each block and on the letter that goes out before the works start. Scanning it opens the site's public page, which shows who is doing the work, the working hours and the upcoming notices. There is no password and nothing to install. Residents who want notices by email join with an email address, and any number of them can at no charge.
Notices are posted once by the site team and then go out by email to everyone who has joined and sit on a calendar anyone with the link can see. On a long programme that calendar is the thing residents most want and most rarely get: not a phase plan, but which days this month are the noisy ones.
Each report records who raised it, when it was raised, when it was acknowledged, when it was resolved and whether the resident confirmed the fix, and the page shows the average response and resolution times across the site. The history is kept for the life of the site, and whoever set the page up sees all of it, so a landlord running eleven sites can read them all rather than waiting to be told. Our page for managing agents covers the same argument where the client is a block rather than an estate.