Party Wall Notices

As we share a wall between us and one neighbour and we are building withing 3 metres of another neighbour, there is a legal duty to serve party wall notices.

The Party Wall Etc Act 1996 requires that notice be given to neighbouring owners if the works you are doing affect them, basically if the new structure is withing 6 metres of a neighbour.  There are different notices that need to be served.  It is a legal duty for a Building Owner to serve the appropriate notices in the correct manner. Failure to do so can result in an injunction being sought to stop the works. The notices are as follows:

Party Structure Notice - These are alterations that dircetly affect a party wall and include common jobs such as cutting holes to insert beams and padstones, cutting in flashings and removing chimney breasts.

Notice of Adjacent Excavation 3 metres - Excavating within 3 metres of your neighbour’s building and to a depth lower than the bottom of their foundations
Notice of Adjacent Excavation 6 metres - Excavating within 6 metres of your neighbour’s building, if any part of that excavation intersects with a plane drawn downwards at an angle of 45 degrees from the bottom of their foundations, taken at a line level with the face of their external wall (this will normally mean that you neighbour is using piled foundations).
Line of Junction Notice - The construction of a new wall adjacent to a boundary or the construction of a new wall astride a boundary.

You can serve the notices yourself and use a website to produce the notices for you like this one: Party Wall Notice Generator.  The notice period for them all apart from the party structure (which is 2 months) is a month,

Our Experience
Before Christmas we had spoken to the neighbours to advise them we would be serving the notice and the neighbours had said that was fine and they would just sign and return them.  We therefore didn't rush in serving the notices and didn't do so until mid-January.  It then came to light that actually the neighbours weren't happy and both sides disputed and wanted to instruct the surveyor.  We had to bear the cost and it worked out at near enough £1500 per neighbour and for ourselves also, with the cost of extra architect and strucural engineer drawings this then worked out at near enough £5k we had not budgeted for.  It also delayed us starting by near enough 2 months.  So what I would say is to serve these notices as early as you can, I would say 3 months before starting, even if your neighbours seem happy enough.  

This was also one of these things that we actually did not know about until we were nearly starting and the architect told us about it as we got our final drawings - nobody had informed us before that.  It seems such a minefield as nobody tells you what you do and don't need to do.