Section 60 notices and construction working hours

A section 60 notice is served by the council's environmental health team, not by the planning department, and it can impose working hours tighter than the ones your planning permission allows. Contravening it without reasonable excuse is a criminal offence. The appeal window is 21 days from service and it is not extendable.

The better move, on any site where noise is foreseeable, is to get in first with a section 61 prior consent. A contractor who applies for consent before starting on site controls the terms. One who waits receives them.

When a council serves a notice

Section 60 of the Control of Pollution Act 1974 gives a local authority power to serve a notice imposing requirements on how construction works are carried out, where it appears that those works are being or are going to be carried out.

Triggers in practice are:

• Complaints from residents about early starts, weekend working or percussive piling.
• A site in a dense residential area where the authority expects trouble and acts pre-emptively.
• Works starting without any prior engagement, which reads to an environmental health officer as a site that will need managing.
• A scheme where the planning condition on hours is silent or ambiguous.

The notice goes to the person carrying out or about to carry out the works, which usually means the principal contractor rather than the developer. Where subcontractors are doing the noisy work, the notice can be served on them too. That split matters for the contract, because the criminal liability follows the notice.

Section 60(4) requires the authority to have regard to the relevant approved code of practice, to the need for best practicable means to minimise noise, to the desirability of specifying acceptable methods rather than simply prohibiting, and to the need to protect people in the locality.

What a notice can require

A section 60 notice is not limited to hours. It can specify the plant or machinery that may or may not be used, the hours during which works may be carried out, and the noise levels that may be emitted from the premises or at any specified point on them.

That third power is the one contractors underestimate. A notice fixing a limit in dB LAeq at a named facade is measurable, and a breach is provable with a calibrated instrument and a dated log.

Requirements commonly seen:

1. Permitted working hours, with separate and tighter hours for noisy activities such as piling, breaking and cutting.
2. A prohibition on specified plant, or a requirement to use particular attenuated equipment.
3. Noise limits at identified receptors, sometimes with a monitoring and reporting obligation.
4. A requirement to notify neighbours before particularly noisy phases.

The authority must specify what is required rather than issue a general instruction to be quiet, and a notice that fails to do so is vulnerable on appeal.

Standard working hours and variations

There is no national statutory set of construction hours. What exists is a convention that most English authorities apply, and it appears in planning conditions and section 60 notices alike: weekday mornings to early evening, a shorter Saturday, and nothing on Sundays or bank holidays.

Treat the local position as the one that governs. Authorities in central London, in cathedral cities and near hospitals routinely impose tighter hours, and some allow a quiet start before the stated time for deliveries and setting out.

Variations are obtainable and are more likely to be granted where:

• The work must be continuous, for example a large concrete pour that cannot be stopped.
• Night working is safer, for example over a railway or on a live highway under possession.
• The noisy activity is short and the alternative is a longer period of moderate disturbance.

Ask in writing, in advance, with a method statement and a neighbour notification plan. An out-of-hours request made at 16:00 on a Friday will be refused.

Appealing a notice and the deadline

An appeal against a section 60 notice lies to the magistrates' court within 21 days of service. Miss it and the notice stands however unreasonable it is.

Grounds of appeal include that the notice is unreasonable in its requirements, that the works are subject to a section 61 consent, or that the authority has failed to have regard to the matters section 60(4) requires. An appeal is not a licence to ignore the notice in the meantime.

Before appealing, try the informal route. Environmental health officers usually prefer an agreed variation to a court hearing, and a contractor arriving with a monitoring proposal and a revised method statement gets further than one arriving with a solicitor's letter.

The relationship with the planning condition

Two regimes run in parallel and neither displaces the other.

A section 60 notice can impose hours tighter than the planning condition, and complying with the planning condition is no defence to a breach of the notice. It works the other way too: an agreed section 60 variation permitting Saturday afternoon working does not override a planning condition prohibiting it, and the developer remains exposed to a breach of condition notice.

Where the permission carries a Construction Management Plan condition, get the hours, the plant list and the monitoring regime consistent across all three documents before the first concrete arrives. Inconsistency between the approved plan, the condition and the notice is the commonest cause of avoidable enforcement.

Separately, statutory nuisance powers under the Environmental Protection Act 1990 sit behind both, and the position after permission is set out in statutory nuisance after planning permission is granted.

Evidence of best practicable means

Best practicable means is defined in section 72 of the 1974 Act and it is the concept the whole regime turns on. Practicable takes account of local conditions, current technical knowledge and financial implications. Means includes the design and maintenance of plant, and the manner in which the site is operated.

Demonstrating it looks like this in a file:

• A noise and vibration assessment carried out in line with BS 5228-1 and BS 5228-2, predicting levels at identified receptors for each phase.
• A plant schedule with sound power levels from manufacturer data.
• A record of alternatives considered and rejected, with reasons, for instance bored piles instead of driven piles.
• Monitoring results against the predicted levels, dated and located.
• A complaints log with response times and actions taken.

A Noise Impact Assessment produced at application stage does part of this, though the construction-phase prediction is a separate exercise from the operational assessment and needs to be recognised as such. Screening measures have limits, and what an acoustic barrier actually achieves is worth understanding before one is offered as mitigation.

Managing neighbour complaints

Most notices follow complaints, so the cheapest control is the one that stops complaints becoming a call to the council.

Name a site contact, publish the number on the hoarding, and answer it. Write to occupiers within the affected radius before each noisy phase with dates and expected duration rather than a general warning. Log every contact with the time, the issue and what was done.

Deliveries and servicing are the activities that generate most out-of-hours complaints, and the patterns behind that are covered in night deliveries and servicing noise.

An environmental health officer deciding whether to serve a notice will look at the complaints history and at how the site responded. A site with an answered phone and a log tends to get a conversation. A site without one gets a notice.

This is general guidance, not legal advice; check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.

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