What the form asks for, and what usually happens
The liaison section of a Section 61 form is broadly worded on purpose. Kensington and Chelsea's prior consent form asks the applicant to detail "arrangements for liaison with residential neighbours, shops and businesses, schools, etc.", in accordance with the borough's Code of Construction Practice, and gives examples of the kind of answer it expects: a named person responsible for community relations, newsletters as the works progress, and, in a line written some years ago and never taken up, the suggestion that a project might consider setting up a website. Other boroughs word it differently and ask for more or less detail. None of them can specify a method, because the Act does not.
So the application says a letter will go to every property within a given radius before works begin, that a named liaison manager will be available during working hours, and that a notice board will carry the contact details. All of that is written in good faith and most of it happens. The letter goes out, once, in week zero, describing a programme that changes in week three. The notice board goes up behind the hoarding line where the reader has to stand in the road to read it. The liaison manager is also the person managing three other sites.
On the Kensington and Chelsea form, liaison is item three of seventeen, sitting between the contractor's contact names and the description of the works, and the example answer it offers is a community relations manager, a project email and hotline, newsletters as the works progress, and a suggestion that a development might consider a website. Most of the other sixteen items ask for something the council can measure or check afterwards: a plant list with sound power levels, predicted noise levels at the nearest facades, a monitoring regime, a programme with dates. The liaison item is the one that asks only for a description of an intention, and nothing later in the process asks whether the intention was carried out.
Six weeks in, a resident who cannot find the letter and has never seen the notice board rings the council instead, because the council is the number you can find. An environmental health officer takes the complaint, phones the site manager, relays it, and phones the resident back. If it happens again the officer does the same thing again. The officer has become the liaison arrangement, which is the one outcome the requirement exists to avoid, and none of the three parties has a record of the exchange beyond the officer's own case note.
When the file is looked at again — at a monitoring visit, on a second application from the same contractor, or in a complaint about how the site was run — the question is always the same. What were the residents told, and what happened when they raised something? The honest answer on most consented sites is that nobody knows, because the arrangements described in the application produced no evidence that they were followed.
The council
An environmental health team's interest in liaison is not paperwork for its own sake. A site that tells residents what is coming generates fewer complaints, and complaints that do arrive are about the work rather than about being ignored. The team's difficulty is that the liaison section of an application is the one part of it that cannot be verified. A method statement can be checked against measurements; a signed statement that letters were delivered cannot be checked against anything.
A public page for the site changes what the officer can see without asking anyone. The notices are on it, dated, so whether residents were told about the Saturday pour is a matter of record rather than of recollection. Every report a resident raises carries the time it was raised, the time the site team acknowledged it and the time it was marked resolved. An officer who receives a complaint can look at the page before making a phone call, and often will not need to make one. Our page for councils and environmental health teams sets out how a team can name a visible route with a record as one acceptable way for applicants to meet the liaison requirement in its own guidance, which costs the council nothing and asks for nothing in return. We are not seeking any council's endorsement and would not claim one.
The record cuts both ways, and a council should want it to. It will show an officer that a contractor answered a dust report within the hour, and it will equally show that a report sat for eleven days. Either way the officer is reading the same log as the resident and the contractor, and the conversation starts from what happened.
The contractor
For a contractor, the liaison section is the part of the application that is easy to write and hard to evidence. Describing a site page in it is a concrete answer: residents can see the working hours and the programme of notices at any time, they can report a problem without finding a phone number, and the site team answers in writing. Prior consent under section 61 of the Control of Pollution Act 1974 is worth having on its own terms, and our guide to Section 61 prior consent covers what goes into an application; the liaison section is where the site page belongs.
The record matters most later. A consent does not prevent complaints, and it is no defence to a statutory nuisance action under section 82 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, so the question at a monitoring visit or after a complaint is how the site actually behaved. A contractor who can show the notice posted four days before the pour, the two reports that came in on the day and the replies sent within the hour is in a different position from one producing a signed distribution sheet. The same evidence is useful to a scheme monitor looking at how a site treats the community, which our guide to the Considerate Constructors Scheme and the community covers, and it is the material a council weighs if it is considering serving a notice under section 60.
There is also the ordinary daily benefit. The public page carries the company name and the working hours and no phone number, so reports arrive somewhere they can be read and answered rather than at the gate or on a site manager's mobile at seven in the morning.
Residents
A resident living beside a consented site is not asking for the works to stop. They are asking when the noisy days are, how long the scaffold will be there, and who to tell about the lorry idling outside the bedroom window. At the moment they want that information they are usually holding either nothing or a letter from four months ago.
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.
What the record gives a resident is the ability to stop repeating themselves. Every report has the time it was raised, the time it was acknowledged and the time it was resolved on it, and they are asked whether the fix worked. The page shows the average response and resolution times for the site, so a resident can see what "we will look into it" has meant in practice here. If they do go to the council, they go with dates rather than an account of three phone calls.
One record for all three
Nobody in this arrangement is being unreasonable. The contractor wrote a liaison plan in good faith, the council asked for one because it has no other lever, and the resident rang the only number they could find. All three are arguing about the past with nothing in common to argue from, and the same shared record answers it for each of them: the notices with the dates they went out, the reports with the times they were raised and answered. On Noisy Neighbour that costs £5 per site per week, and residents join free.
How Noisy Neighbour works on a consented site
The contractor sets the page up and prints the QR sheet, which goes on the hoarding at eye level, on the gate and on the letter that goes out before works begin. Scanning it opens the site's public page, showing who is doing the work, the consented working hours and the upcoming notices. There is no password and nothing for residents to install, and those who want notices by email join the page with an email address. Any number of them can, at no charge.
Notices are posted once by the site team, emailed to every resident who has joined and shown on a calendar anyone with the link can see, including an officer. A notice posted four days before a concrete pour stays visible for those four days and stays on the record afterwards, which a letter and a notice board behind a hoarding do not.
Every report records who raised it, when it was raised, when the site team acknowledged it, 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, so the evidence of liaison exists at the end of the job rather than being reconstructed for a meeting. Our page for builders covers the same ground from the site team's point of view.