Party Wall PRO Philippe Weyland

Now that party wall work has been drying up for the past two months and the majority of surveyor staff are either working from home or furloughed, how can we get back to work in an efficient way while lockdown progressively eases? Sunday’s PM speech gave broad guidelines but what can you do now to make sure instructions flow your way once business picks up again. In this podcast Philippe will explain what you can do to (i) speed up the process to get your instructions back up; (ii) run an efficient party wall practice while managing your team remotely; and (iii) save money on the way

Rob French, an equity partner at Delva Patman Redler, tells us about the unique issues arising with digging basements next to basements and provides practical advice to surveyors confronted with these problems.
You can also watch this interview in video format here.
Transcript
Philippe: Hi, and welcome to another edition of Party Wall PRO, the podcast. I’ve got Rob French with me today from Delva Patman Redler. He is an equity partner there. And he is here to talk to us about basements. 
So Rob, tell me about the excitement behind basements. You hear all the time these basements in Mayfair and stuff, these crazy things that have been dug out. And you’ve – so you’ve prepared a presentation that you’ve given at the London branch of the Pyramus and Thisbe Club and I think you’re going on tour over the next few months? I’m quite excited about this because it’s obviously a subject matter that people are interested in. 
So I think this time it’s going to be more kind of lecture style because of course you’ve got your material. You’ve got your slides that hopefully we will be able to put into the podcast. So I’ll leave the floor to you. 
Rob French: Thanks a lot. We have been doing basements for quite a while. But now we have got a new situation where, because we’ve done so many basements, we are doing basements next to basements now . So basements next basements brings in a new set of skills and a new set of legal implications and possibilities for dispute that we are now dealing with more and more. So this presentation goes through the standard issues with basements but also a lot of the intricacies where we deal with basements adjoining existing basements. 
I’ve tried to split this into key issues that I’ve come across and also the issues that I foresee will play out in the future. So some of this is based on issues I have dealt with and some are purely speculation of what I feel further court cases might be. 
So the first issue is enclosure costs with trimming overspill and trespass. The situation here is that where we agree an award where there’s a basement already done to one side and then the adjoining owner wants to excavate their own basement within that award there will be enclosure costs under Section 11(11) of the Party Wall Etc. Act 1996. So they will usually be agreed by the surveyors upfront and included in the award. 
And then when the – what used to be the adjoining owner now the building owner, excavates down, they find that the underpins have extended further into their property than what they expected either due to poor back shuttering, concrete overspill, or other  various reasons. But they then find themselves faced with having to trim those underpins and/or set back the wall of their basement. Usually, they will opt for trimming because the floor area where the basement is undertaken is, obviously, key. 
What the building owner, the one now undertaking the work, usually likes to do is to suggest there’s a setoff that takes place between the costs of trimming the overspill against this Section 11(11) costs agreed. But the problems start to rise where technically and legally, you can’t actually do that because there’s no right of setoff. As soon as the enclosure is made on the underpins, moneys are owed so the adjoining owner can enforce the award to achieve those payments. So trying to explain this to the building owner that they have to pay out even when they are at loss due to trimming is quite difficult. 
There are other issues as well that go along with this and that is that the now building owner assumes that the tribunal of surveyors can deal with the costs. But actually, they can’t under the Party Wall Etc. Act 1996 Section 2.2. the surveyors can give the rights to trim this trespass but there’s no mechanism to award those costs against the adjoining owner. 
So the only way that you can actually claim costs is to go back to the original tribunal of

Michael Cooper, head of Neighbourly Matters at Colliers International and Chairman of the Working Group on RICS Party Wall Legislation and Procedure 7th edition Guidance Note walks us through the most important changes of the 7th edition and how to implement them.
You can also watch this interview in video format here.
Introduction 
PW – Welcome to another edition of Party Wall PRO the podcast
It has been a while again and I’m really sorry; the reason why is because we have been busy working on the software for your schedules of condition (www.surveykit.io). Actually Michael that’s something I never actually talked to you about but our Party Wall PRO customers have been asking us for ages for a tool to help them with their scheduling and so we have developed something for phones so that they can take photos and dictate on their device and it automatically inserts photos into the report with the relevant condition avoiding the hassle after a site visit of having to go through hundreds of pictures and deciding which goes to which condition and so we have been busy developing that.
Also because I wanted to have this podcast and we have been talking about this for nearly a year I think and of course with public consultation it took ages. So I’m really excited to have Michael Cooper with us, who as you probably already know is head of neighbourly matters at Colliers international and you were the chairperson of the working group on this 7th edition right?
MC – That’s right 
PW – so the purpose of or the subject matter of this podcast is the RICS 7th edition party wall guidance note which will be effective on 1 December 2019.
So this podcast is more of a kind of lecture format as opposed to Q&A because Michael has a lot of good stuff to deliver and I hope we can cover where this 7th edition is coming from and where the changes are and may be kind of a good way of explaining what our audience needs to know in order to implement the 7th edition. So I hope this is a good enough introduction Michael.
MC -where would you like to start 
PW – How did you get involved ?
Essentially the RICS, as I’m sure you are aware, is currently spilt into a number of faculties that includes Building surveying, land surveying, quantity surveying etc.  now I can’t claim to know anything about the inner workings of the RICS suffice to say that I think each faculty head takes a certain responsibility for ensuring guidance is kept up to date and to do this they select a team, of advisors from the relevant area of the profession and I happen to be on the RICS boundaries and party wall panel which comes under the faculty of Land surveying.
So It was decided essentially by the panel dare I say it on the advice of myself and another practising party wall surveyor that we should consider a revision to the 6th edition of the RICS guidance note following a little bit of online criticism and some relevant criticism of the old guide.  The changes being borne mostly out of commentary on case law, and so I was tasked along with Andrew to form a working group to essentially rework the guide and see if it needed any adjustments and for want of a better description this is where it started.
PW – and how long did this take?
I would say 15 months or so from start to finish, so once we formed the working group, we set an agenda of trying to meet once a month and we initially put in 8 meetings in the hope that it would be enough but it proved it wasn’t going to be enough!  It took about 15 meetings in the end, but once the new working party had been formed and got together we sub divided some tasks and went away in smaller groups and came back with our small group conclusions on certain things but, on the whole we sat on the whole we sat in somebody’s office for 4 hours at a time and went through the old guide page by page and comment by comment and added in a few things of our own, you will notice that there is a new draft party wall award

In this episode, Shirley Waldron of Delva Patman Redler talks about her work with Crossrail and how the Crossrail Act affected the application of the Party Wall Etc. Act 1996.
Shirley also gives her views on the effectiveness of the Party Wall Etc. Act 1996, its failings and what kind of amendments could be put forward and her opinion on whether all leaseholders are entitled to service of notice for works under section 6 of the Party Wall Etc. Act 1996.
You can also watch this interview on YouTube.
Transcription
Philippe: Hi and welcome to another edition of Party Wall PRO the Podcast. I’ve got Shirley Waldron with me today from Delva Patman Redler. Shirley has a bit of a different background which is quite interesting. She’s an architect from training and got sucked into the party wall world. Shirley, welcome. Thanks for joining us. So let’s get into how you ended up there from being a chartered architect and then party wall.
Shirley: Yes. OK. Well, I had wanted to do architecture from a very young age. I think in that way, I was quite lucky because most of my friends didn’t know what they wanted to do. A lot of my fellow students didn’t know what they wanted to do and some people just kind of drifted into whichever career sort of took them in whichever direction. But I was very lucky I think in that I knew I wanted to do architecture from about age 11 or so like that. So every decision I made really took me in that direction which meant that I focused on the relevant A levels, and then got into architecture at university. I was at Brighton College for my A levels and in Brighton at the local polytechnic, they had the School of Architecture, which is now of course Brighton University. I was very lucky to have some very good lecturers and tutors there and it was great to do what I wanted to do. I stayed in Brighton to do my year out. I don’t know if everyone is aware but architecture is a seven-year course. You have a three-year degree course. You do a year in private practice or even in government practice. You go back to university to do a diploma and then you do a final year in practice and then you can do your part three. I did all my training in Brighton and I did my year out as well in Brighton and it was only when I finally got my diploma that I wanted to do something different and I went to live in Gilford and I worked for an architecture practice in Gilford. In fact I worked for all three at the time, Scott Brownrigg, Lewis and Hickey and Norman and Dawbarn and that was very interesting. I worked on some MOD projects, I worked on – for Scott Brownrigg – Terminal 2 Manchester Airport and just at that time, CAD was coming through and I was on one of the very first training programs in Cambridge. The training course was a week long actually, and it was done by McDonnell Douglas, the aircraft manufacturers, the engineers and they were on this course which was GDS and it was actually a very impressive tool, which then subsequently became Micro GDS and there were various other offshoots to that, Auto CAD, et cetera, and it kind of took on a life of its own. But yes, I was one of the very first people to train as a CAD technician as a qualified architect. I did that for years actually. I had a stint in Singapore where I worked for a firm of architects and that was by choice. I went to live in Singapore for three years and I did architecture there and I then stopped doing architecture because I was having too much fun and I decided I was going to teach English and I did that. I taught English to mostly Japanese students. But doing that meant I could dictate my own terms really and my own calendar. It kind of freed me up. I ran my own business there basically, teaching English to mostly Japanese students, which was quite an eye-opener. Actually it was a great place to live. Everything worked. It was very clean and everything functioned and yet it was all in the middle of the most amazing travel opportunities

In this episode, Stuart Birrell talks about party wall fees, good practices, training for Party Wall surveyors and much more.
You can also watch this interview on YouTube.
Transcription
Philippe: Hi, hi and welcome to another edition of Party Wall Pro Podcast and today I’m very excited to have Stuart Birrell with me from Murray Birrell. He’s a Fellow of the RICS and 40 years into the job, if I’m not mistaken.
You are also a member of the London Committee of the Pyramus & Thisbe Club. We have a few questions that our audience have sent through that we’re going to go through. But before we start, Stuart Birrell, how did you get to where you are? Give us a bit of background of where you come from and how you ended up here?
Stuart: It’s a long story. It’s 43 years now incidentally. I got into surveying by complete accident. I left school, had enough of education, worked on building sites and hurt my back. I went to what used to be called the employment office to sign on and they told me, “You can’t sign on until you’ve applied for jobs.”
I had been on a course with John Lane when I was at school. So I said, “Quantity Surveyor” and they said: “do you want to be a quantity surveyor”. “No, I don’t. But you asked me to put a name down, so I have. Went for a couple of interviews, didn’t like them and I eventually ended up having an interview with somebody called a building surveyor, which I had never actually heard of. And I quite like technical drawing and is what you did in those days when you started. So I took the job and the rest is history really. That was in 1982. I became a fellow in 1995. Keith and I started our business 1992. So we’re 25 years old now. So yeah, it has been a long time.
Philippe: Yeah, you’ve seen it all. So 25 years in the business. How is it going?
Stuart: Yes, it’s doing OK. We’ve grown organically. We’ve never been great businessmen. We’re suppliers basically. But we’ve done OK. We’re still talking to each other, which is amazing really.
Philippe: Yes. So how did you meet Keith and decided to start a business together?
Stuart: Well, yeah. We had virtually parallel careers. I met him at college in the late ’70s and we qualified on the same day. I got him a job where I was working at John Pellings at the time. We became senior surveyors on the same day and associates on the same day, partners on the same day and eventually we left on the same day. So it’s rather boring really. But yeah, met him a long, long time.
Philippe: And from the general surveying into party wall – I’m not sure what the kind of ratio party wall to other general building surveyor work you’re doing at Murray Birrell. But how did you end up developing this specialism?
Stuart: You’re looking for income streams running a business, within your skill set. It has to be within your skill set I think. Both of our history, we’re contract surveyors really. That’s what we grew up doing. Mainly maintenance and rehabilitation of existing buildings. You get involved in party walls when you’re doing it. So you start doing it. You learn a little bit. You work with people. You listen. You learn. 15, 20 years ago, it was probably a negligible part of our business. Now it’s about 22, 23 percent roughly and we do a lot of licenses to alter, we still do a lot of construction work. We do dilapidations. So we do most things that building surveyors do. But I sort of specialised to a greater degree over the last, last 10, 12 years I suppose really.
Philippe: And enjoying it?
Stuart: Yes, I do. It’s less confrontational than doing construction work. So it amuses me when people say, “Oh, you’re being really difficult.” You don’t know what difficult is.” People want to punch your head off in construction work… I do enjoy it. I do enjoy it.
Philippe: Now that’s inter

In this episode, Andrew Schofield gives his views, interpretations and opinion on invoking the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 without serving a notice; the scope of Section 7(2) compensation; rights and obligations in using drones for surveys; demystifying the old conflict between the Pyramus and Thisbe Club and the Faculty of Party Wall Surveyors.
You can also watch this interview on YouTube.
Transcription
Philippe: Hi and welcome to another edition of Party Wall PRO the Podcast. Sorry it took me so long to get back online but we’ve been very busy with lots of new customers for our party wall software and also developing a software for schedule of condition that we’re going to release in a few months, which is quite exciting.
I’m very excited today because I’ve got Andrew Schofield with me of Schofield Surveyors and he has agreed to come on the show because…you owe me one, right?
Before we dig into the questions, because this time, it’s a little bit different. I actually went out to our community of users and our mailing list to ask people – to ask you questions directly and we had a ton of responses. So I’m not going to go through all of them but we will try to at least talk about the common themes that came through.
But first of all Andrew, how did you get to where you are? How did you end up doing Party Wall and neighbourly matters?
Andrew: A bit of check on my background. Not a very nice boy at school. Went to sea when I was 16. Spent eight years in the merchant navy, went everywhere, had a thoroughly good time. I met lots of people, some with negotiable affection and well, I met a girl, came to shore, bummed around. Sold brushes door to door, worked at pubs, security guard and then one day I walked past the estate agents where I’d recently bought this flat and I had a young barrister sleeping on the floor to help pay the rent and I walked in to get a job and like the Boys from the Blackstuff – and started off as an estate agent. Did about 12 months of that and then decided I want to be an auctioneer. How to be an auctioneer? You’ve got to a chartered surveyor. Didn’t know any of this of course. Then I met an awesome building surveyor by the way, Mike Rutherford. He’s just brilliant and he – learned with him and went on to Brittain Hadley, partnership, then Conrad Ritblat, as it was in the day, as a senior. Then I signed at another practice for about 10 years10 years, went to Delva Patman where I was a partner and was there for nearly 10 years I think. And then I thought why not try and regain a bit of high ground. I felt that building surveying generally, the standards have dropped – I think the RICS, since the labour reform has changed a lot and I wanted to start something that’s a bit different, also on a different structure to a practice rather than having – I believe very much employee owned so everyone has vested interest in business and it’s a very transparent organisation as much as the people ask a question about – for example, what I earn and I answer it and there’s no hidden secrets about this. We’ve got a business plan to build it up to a certain size and structure it for longevity and it’s not for me, the practice really, I’ve already made the decision. When I’m 65, I resign as a director and they can keep me on as a consultant if they’re not sick of me by then. That’s basically it. It’s a bit of a swan song try to get a high ground, a bit more moral, a bit more – as I say, try and get back to the genuine core interests of construction and the inquiring mind that that requires.
Philippe: So what’s the grand plan? Because I’ve seen you’ve managed to poach some young talent.
Andrew: Poach? Poach? I am so hurt by that comment – these people came to me! They are – I’m really lucky, I’ve got the finest surveyors available really who are great. Yeah, they’re awesome. I mean they’re a lot better than I am. Everything we’ve – obviously Jack is