Do I need a party wall agreement?

The Party Wall etc. Act is widely misunderstood as a neighbour veto. It is closer to the opposite: it gives you a statutory right to carry out certain work affecting a shared structure, in exchange for notifying properly, recording the condition of the neighbour's property, and doing the work in a way that protects it. Skipping the notice loses you the protection as well as the right.

Safety

Step by step

1. Check you are in England or Wales.The Act does not extend to Scotland or Northern Ireland, where shared walls are dealt with under different law and different practice. Get local advice rather than applying the Act by analogy.
2. Check for work to a shared wall or structure.Cutting into it, removing a chimney breast from it, raising it, underpinning it, rebuilding it, inserting a beam or damp course into it, or removing projections. This includes a shared floor or ceiling structure between flats.
3. Check for work on or up to the boundary line.Building a new wall on the line of junction, or up against it, where nothing currently stands. There is a separate notice for this and it applies even to a garden wall.
4. Check for excavation near a neighbouring building.Digging foundations, a basement or a new structure within the distances and to the depths the Act specifies relative to a neighbour's building or structure. This catches many ordinary rear extensions.
5. Identify every adjoining owner.Freeholders and long leaseholders both count, and a flat can have several. Notice served on the wrong person is not notice, and a managing agent is not automatically an owner.
6. Do not confuse this with planning or building control.The Act is a private-law regime between owners. Serving notice is not permission for the development, and having planning permission does not remove the need for notice.
7. Talk to the neighbour before the notice arrives.A formal legal notice landing unannounced is what turns a routine job into a dispute. A conversation and a look at the drawings first costs nothing and changes the response rate dramatically.
8. Get the government's explanatory booklet.The Act's explanatory booklet sets out the notice types, the current periods and specimen letters. Use the current version for the periods rather than any figure from an article.

Tips

• The Act also applies where the neighbour is a council, a housing association or a commercial owner. The process is the same and the correspondence is slower, so start earlier.
• A schedule of condition of the neighbour's property, with photographs, protects you as much as them. Without one, every existing crack becomes your problem.
• If you are not sure whether the work is notifiable, a short paid consultation with a party wall surveyor is much cheaper than an injunction.

Common mistakes

• Assuming a friendly neighbour makes notice unnecessary — Relationships change during building work, and a verbal agreement gives you no schedule of condition and no award to point to when a crack appears.
• Serving notice after work has started — The right depends on serving notice properly beforehand. Retrospective notice does not cure it, and the neighbour's remedy is an injunction.

Questions people ask