What usually happens
The consultation is done. The notices went out, the observations were answered, the contractor was chosen, and the leaseholders paid their share into the reserve. Then the scaffold goes up on a Monday and the noise starts on the Tuesday, and from that point the arrangement for keeping residents informed is whatever the site manager and the block manager have time for.
A leaseholder on the third floor phones the managing agent's office on the Wednesday because the grinding started before eight and has not stopped. The person who answers takes a message. They do not know when the noise will stop, because they are in an office two miles away and the programme is on the contractor's laptop. The leaseholder phones again on Thursday and gets a different person, who takes the same message.
We watched one resident go through the long version of this. The works had isolated a riser and her shower stopped working. She rang the office and nobody acknowledged it. She rang again a few days later and got somebody else, who was not sure and would check. An email arrived the next morning asking what exactly the problem was. She answered within the hour, and then it was the weekend. On the Monday the first person picked up, was shocked it had not been sorted, and booked an engineer before going on holiday. The engineer arrived without the right part, and the person in the office could not help. He came back the following week and she was out, because nobody had told her he was coming. Three weeks without a shower, and the whole of it recorded as a call log she could not see and two emails.
Three weeks later the same leaseholder writes to the agent to say they have been emailing about the noise for three weeks with no reply, and that they want a reduction in the service charge for the disruption. The agent searches the shared inbox and finds one email from a fortnight ago that somebody read and did not answer. They cannot say what the site manager did about the noise, because the site manager was told by phone, and they cannot show that the leaseholder was told anything either. The agent is now negotiating from memory, and so is the leaseholder.
Nothing in this sequence is unusual, and nobody in it has behaved badly. The contractor did give notice, on a sheet of paper in the lobby that came down when the lift was serviced. The agent did log the calls, in a system residents cannot see. The leaseholder did raise the problem, three times, by three routes, none of which left a trail the other two could check.
Residents
Residents of a block during major works have the noise, the dust and the scaffold outside the bedroom window, and the least information of anyone. What they want is simple to state: to know what is happening this week, to have somewhere to report a problem that is not a switchboard, and to be able to see that the report went somewhere.
On the site page, a resident sees the company doing the work, the working hours, and the calendar of notices for the weeks ahead. When they report a problem they pick a category, describe it, add a photo if it helps, and the site team is told straight away. The reply comes back in the same thread. Every issue they raise carries the time it was raised, the time it was acknowledged and the time it was marked resolved, and they are asked whether the fix actually worked.
The page also shows the average time the site team takes to respond to an issue and to resolve one. A resident who has been told "we will get back to you" can see what that has meant in practice on this block, and does not have to take anyone's word for it. If a dispute over the service charge follows, the resident starts from a record rather than a memory. Our page for residents in a managed block covers what to do with that record, and includes a message asking the agent or the board to set a page up.
The managing agent
The agent's position is the one most people misread. The agent is not the villain of the scene above. The agent is the party with the most to lose from having no record, because the complaint lands on their desk and the compensation claim is addressed to them.
The same timestamps that show a resident when their issue was acknowledged show the agent the same thing. Suppose the agent's own complaints procedure promises a response within three working days. With the record, the agent can show that the noise report raised on Wednesday morning was acknowledged on Wednesday afternoon and marked resolved on Thursday, with a photo of the acoustic screen the contractor put up. Without it, the agent has a leaseholder's account of three weeks of silence and nothing to set against it. The record cuts both ways, and an agent who does respond within their standard should want that on paper.
The other thing the page does for the agent is move the daily calls out of the office. Problems go to the site team, who are the people who can fix them, and the agent watches the log rather than relaying it. When a leaseholder asks the agent what was done about last week's dust, the agent opens the page and reads the thread. Our page for managing agents sets this out in more detail.
The contractor
For the contractor, the page is where notices go and where complaints arrive. A notice about a concrete pour or a crane lift is posted once, is emailed to every resident who has joined the page, and sits on a calendar anyone with the link can see. It does not come down when the lift is serviced.
The public page shows the company name and the working hours, and nothing else. There is no phone number on the hoarding, so nobody on site is taking calls at the gate, and the person who answers a report is the person who can act on it. Every reply is dated, with photos if they help, which means that if a complaint reaches the council or the agent's board, the contractor can show how it was handled and when. Our page for builders has the site team's side of this.
RTM directors and residents' trusts
A right-to-manage company or a residents' trust sits in an awkward place during major works. Its directors are residents themselves, hearing the noise, and they are also the client, answerable to their neighbours for how the works are run. They are usually doing this unpaid, in the evenings, from a group email.
A board can set up the site page itself and invite the contractor and the agent to it, so the record belongs to the block rather than to whichever firm happens to be on site this year. The directors see every issue and every notice without asking anyone how it is going. When a leaseholder raises the works at the annual meeting, the board has the log rather than a recollection. The right to manage itself is set out in Part 2 of the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act 2002; the site page is a practical tool for running the works, not part of that process.
One record for all of them
Every person in this scene is arguing about the past with no record of it, and each of them would be better off with one. A shared, dated record of the notices, the issues and the replies settles the argument for the resident, the agent, the contractor and the board alike, because it is the same record for all of them. On Noisy Neighbour a block is billed on its dwellings, at £1 per dwelling per week; a single job on one house stays at £5 per site per week. Residents join free either way.
How Noisy Neighbour works on a block
Whoever sets up the page, whether that is the agent, the board or the contractor, prints the QR sheet and puts it in the lobby, by the lifts and on the hoarding. Scanning it opens the block's public page, which shows who is doing the work, the working hours and the upcoming notices. Residents do not install anything and do not need a password. Those who want notices by email join the page with an email address.
Notices are posted once by the site team. Each is emailed to every resident who has joined and shown on a calendar that anyone with the link can see. The types cover what major works actually involve: noisy work, deliveries, skips and waste collections, milestones such as the scaffold going up or coming down, and utility interruptions.
A resident reports a problem by picking a category, describing it and adding a photo if useful. The site team is notified straight away and replies in the same thread. Each issue 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 works. The history is kept for the life of the site, and whoever set the page up sees all of it. Section 20 consultation and what it does not cover during the works are explained in our guide to Section 20 major works communication; the consultation requirements themselves are in section 20 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 and the Service Charges (Consultation Requirements) (England) Regulations 2003.