Digging Foundations and The Party Wall Act

If you dig foundations within 3m of a neighbour, you may need to formalise your works under the Party Wall Act. To explain further, we will take a look at some of the scenarios where you will need to serve a notice upon your neighbour.

Digging within 3m

If you are proposing to dig foundations within 3m of your neighbour, you will need to serve them with a notice of your intentions only if you will be digging deeper than the foundations of their property. In practice this involves a good deal of educated guess work and a good surveyor should be able to tell you how deep the neighbours foundations are likely to be.

Older houses, for example from the Victorian period tend to have shallow foundations and after the second world war the foundations become deeper. You will need to ask a surveyor for further information here.

Digging within 6m

There is a part of the Act the requires notice to be served on a neighbour if you are forming very deep foundations within 6m of a neighbour. In practice this generally only applies to piled foundations, rare in a residential setting. This one is a little more complex to calculate as it is taken from the approximate midpoint of the underside of the neighbours foundation. If a 45 degree line is struck and hits the proposed foundation then a notice is required to be served.

If in doubt always give a surveyor a call, they can guide you on how best to proceed. Lots of useful information can be found here.