If you’re about to embark on the party wall procedures for works to your property and will need to serve a party wall notice upon an adjoining owner, who also happens to be a local authority, we thought we’d set out the best way to do this!
The party wall notice will need to be served in the normal manner, albeit in this case it will likely be addressed to your local town hall, offices of your local authority, or whatever postal address they nominate.
The reality post party wall notice service is that the document will desk surf for a few days to weeks, while it finds itself to the person within the local authority who deals with the party wall procedures.
In many cases, this could be an in-house surveyor, however, it could equally be outsourced to an external service provider. You could also find yourself in the position whereby you simply don’t get a party wall notice response as the notice never finds its rightful place within the local authority office.
Here at Stokemont, in our experience the third outcome tends to be the most likely. We’ve many times tried to compile a list of all of the surveyors within local authorities who handle the party wall matters, however it has proved quite a tricky task over the years as surveyors are regularly reassigned or change department.
In any outcome, we’d advise you prepare for the full statutory party wall notice period to run before response is received, if at all!
It’s worth budgeting this timing into your pre work plans as that will go a long way to avoiding last minute delay and ensuring the contractor is able to start the proposed works as planned.
If your planning on undertaking construction works that require party wall notices, give our team of experienced party wall surveyors a call today who will be more than happy to assist you.
