Template · Party Wall etc. Act 1996
Party wall notices, written out for you
Four documents cover almost every domestic job: the three notices you may have to serve and the reply your neighbour returns. Tick the ones you need, fill in one form, and each comes out as a finished letter with the statutory wording in it and the earliest lawful start date worked out.
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The four documents
Before you serve anything
- Serve on every adjoining owner. That means the freeholder and any leaseholder whose lease is for a year or more, so with flats it is usually both. Miss one and the notice is not good against them.
- The clock runs from service, not from posting. Two months for a party structure notice, one month for a line of junction or adjacent excavation notice, counted from the day the neighbour receives it. Allow for delivery and keep a note of when it went and how.
- A notice lasts twelve months. For a party structure notice that is the express rule in section 3(2)(b): it ceases to have effect if the work has not begun within twelve months of service, or is not then carried on with due diligence. The other notices are treated the same way in practice. Serve a year before you build and you will be serving again.
- Fourteen days, and silence is not consent. Your neighbour has fourteen days from service to consent in writing. No reply counts as dissent, a dispute is deemed to have arisen, and it then goes to a single agreed surveyor or one surveyor each, whose award binds you both. The costs of getting there normally fall to the building owner.
- Section 6 can reach the neighbour you do not share a wall with. For excavation, a property counts as adjoining if it is within the relevant distance, even when it does not touch yours. On a deep dig the next-but-one house can need a notice too, and owners miss this because they are thinking about the party wall rather than the hole.
- Send the reply form with the notice. Every notice a surveyor sends encloses one. It costs nothing and it removes the commonest reason for silence, which is not knowing what to write back. Silence is deemed dissent, and deemed dissent is what costs you two surveyors.
- Name a surveyor you would use. One agreed surveyor under section 10(1)(a) is a single fee between you. Two surveyors is two fees, normally both paid by the building owner. Asking the question in the notice, with a name attached, is the cheapest paragraph you will ever write.
- Get a schedule of condition done. A written and photographic record of the neighbour’s property before anything starts, agreed by both sides. It costs little and it is the only thing that settles an argument about a crack six months later.
- Special foundations need consent. Foundations using an assemblage of beams or rods cannot be placed on your neighbour’s land without their previous consent in writing, under section 7(4), and where you propose them the notice has to carry plans, sections and the loads they will take.
- A notice is not permission. It is nothing to do with planning permission or building control, and it does not replace either. You can need all three, or only one.
England and Wales only. The Party Wall etc. Act 1996 does not apply in Scotland or Northern Ireland, where the position is a matter of common law and the title deeds.
These are starting points, not legal advice. A template cannot see your drawings, and it does not know whether the wall is a party wall at all, who else owns an interest next door, or whether what you have described is really what the builder is going to do. Have a party wall surveyor check anything with money in it before it goes out. An invalid notice can be challenged long after the scaffold is up, and the work stops while it is put right.