Neighbours smashed through loft, no party wall agreement

[ophelia67]

Our neighbours have just built a loft extension. The builders have smashed through into our loft, the steel from their side is exposed on our side. They came round to "fix" it but have left a lot of damage our side.

The neighbours didn't consult us first or ask us to sign a party wall agreement. Are there going to be ramifications for them/us if either of us need to sell being that there isn't an agreement?

Surely they would have been given a copy?

Yes they do
Its the responsibility of the applicant to ensure their application is within the law
planners only deal with planning
Ive had applicants include neighbours property in an application. Neighbours tell planners ( or I do on their behalf) Nothing happens application gets approval.
Doesn't mean they can do works on land they don’t own
Happens all the time
Large offices in London ( I’ve worked in a few) often show adjoining land all prettied up with trees to make a development look nicer. Doesn’t mean they can do it…..legally.

Sitting here in office at the moment with colleagues wondering what planners asked for PWA at planning ?

Obviously….some people just can’t take professional advice.

Yes
This little ditty came up and we ve all been enjoying it

its my practice I can do what I want

It’s a friday….long pub lunch….
Then design presentations and office chat…..

Not on a Friday afternoon…….😀

Contact your home insurers and report the damage. Provide details of neighbours, date of work, pics etc.

Oh absolutely. I wouldn't have wanted them to start without everything in place. It's like they say. "Fail to plan, plan to fail"

If they applied for planning permission you should have had a letter through your door to inform you, and to give your views on it - planning departments need to do this as part of regulatory requirements

It’s ALL of Friday afternoon.
Quite normal
A chance for everyone to get to know all the designs on the board at the moment
Crit them and offer suggestions

Almost
They have to do this as part of planning not building regs
So you can object if there’s a planning reason for it
ie you’ll be overshadowed, loss of privacy loads of other stuff.
Finishing work now, it’s been a long hard day on mumsnet😆😆😆

No - they just pass the decision onto the effing useless Planning Inspectorate who will swiftly approve it instead via retrospective PP and completely miss the legitimate arguments against it. They are really susceptible to sob stories and manipulation if your neighbour is good at spinning those.

Sublime of course we would remember signing the agreement, I had children, I didn't lose my mind. DH certainly didn't. And of course the lack of agreement has been thrown around in conversations with the neighbours, this is where the "we fucked up" followed by wine came from.

DH is going round there tonight when neighbour is home from work to discuss.

@whatkatydid2013 I would be the same. I said to DH, if the neighbours just weren't aware of the importance of the agreement, surely the builders would have guided them.

Nothing was received in the post, plans are on the council website.

@Sublimeursula
It is very very unlikely that PP would have been granted without evidence of the PWA

My local council Planning (South East England) definitely don't make PP contingent on PWA. My friend has had a 3 year battle with neighbour re his plans to vastly overdevelop the plot on which his house stands.
He has made many planning applications, most of which were approved (handy when you are on the Town Council Planning committee...) but only approached her about PWA when he actually wanted to break ground

This is going to cost the neighbour and / or the builder A LOT of money!

It depends what you mean. So if you mean would they agree to something that breached planning criteria then no they wouldn't but (for example) they wouldn't check that the plans you submitted would meet all the safety criteria for building regs & wouldn't inspect your building to check what you are proposing is physically possible to do either.

As an example my parent got planning permission based on drawings with a certain number/size of windows in an extension but the building regs person wouldn't sign off unless they triple glazed everything and changed some windows to be smaller for criteria to meet some energy efficiency rules. I think they said it was largely as he did some calculation based on just the relatively small extension and not the whole room where the architect thought they'd do it based on the room. Just because you get planning permission doesn't preclude having to do other things like get a party wall agreement and building regs. I believe in a similar vein you could get planning permission to build on the boundary line but to actually do that you need your neighbor to agree to let you (& if not you have to adjust your plans to build a slightly smaller extension where the whole footprint is on your land). Or you could have what happened to us where when we started work we discovered our neighbors existing (thankfully tiny) extension had no foundations so without a party wall you could have ended up liable for damage to something that was never fit for purpose. Thankfully our neighbors are very honest and had mentioned issues with it so builder checked it out and we were able to sort out them underpinning their extension alongside building ours.