Hello and welcome to today’s property surveying blog post, in today’s topic we are going to be looking at whether it would be necessary to serve a Party Wall Notice for the removal of a chimney breast.
The simple answer is that if the chimney breast is on the Party Wall, then this would require you to serve a Party Wall Notice, as in order to remove the chimney breast, would require cutting into and away from the Party Wall.
Cutting into the Party Wall would fall under Notifiable work in accordance with the Party Wall etc Act 1996 and so you would have a statutory duty to serve a Party Wall Notice on anyone within proximity of the planned works, typically being your neighbours.
What is the Party Wall Notice?
A Party Wall Notice is a letter that is sent to your Neighbours/adjoining owners that will inform them of the Notifiable works that would be taking place and must include details of the owners and/or their Party Wall Surveyor.
The Party Wall Notices do also generally come accompanied with drawings, which when concerning section 6 works, foundation drawings are necessary.
With this blog concerning a chimney breast removal, excavations would not be relevant to the planned works and so drawings would not be necessary to make up part of the Party Wall Notice, but it would be best practice to provide them.
Rather removing the chimney breast would fall under section 2 of the Party Wall etc Act 1996.
For works that are covered under section 2, would require you to serve a Party Wall Notice to be served a minimum of 2 months to any adjoining owners (your neighbours) before the planned works are to take place.
The Party Wall Notice will also come with certain response times that would have to be considered when organising your planned works.
The initial Party Wall Notice that is served, will come with a 16 day response time, which consists of 14 statutory days and a further 2 day allowance for postage.
If there is no response from the initial Party Wall Notice, then a second Party Wall Notice will have to be served to the adjoining owners, this is generally referred to as a 10(4) Notice.
The 10(4) Notice will come with a total response time of 12 days, consisting of 10 statutory days and a further 2-day allowance of postage.
If the 10(4) Notice remains without response, you would be in the position to appoint a Party Wall Surveyor on the unresponsive neighbour’s behalf, although this is not a requirement under the Act.
At Stokemont would generally consider it best to appoint a Party Wall Surveyor for the unresponsive owner as if one is not chosen on their behalf, then they would be capable of appointing their own Party Wall Surveyor at any time throughout the planned works.
Responding to the Party Wall Notice
Once an adjoining owner is served with a Party Wall Notice there are 3 distinct ways that you would be capable of responding to the Notice.
The first response option is to consent to the Party Wall Notice, this would then be as far as the Party Wall Procedures would go, and if any dispute was to arise, then this would have to be handled by way of common law.
The second response option is to dissent and appoint an Agreed Party Wall Surveyor, so there would be one Party Wall Surveyor for all parties to the dispute, who would be solely responsible for implementing the Party Wall procedures and the production of the Party Wall Award.
The final response option is to dissent and appoint your own Party Wall Surveyor, so each party to the dispute will have its own Party Wall Surveyor where, unlike the second option the Party Wall Surveyor would work together in order to implement the Party Wall Procedures and decide upon a Party Wall Award together.
Thank you for reading today’s property surveying blog post, if you have any questions in regards to today’s topic or any of the services that we offer here at Stokemont, then please do not hesitate to get in touch today, by either giving us a call or popping us over an email and one of our experienced surveyors will be happy to assist and advise.
