Few debates in party wall practice generate as much heat as the question of surveyor impartiality. On one side is the view that all surveyors involved in making awards must act like neutral decision-makers, independent of the owners who appointed them. On the other is the argument that party-appointed surveyors are not truly neutral at all, but are primarily responsible to the owners who chose them, with only the agreed surveyor or third surveyor occupying a fully impartial role.
This debate persists because both sides capture something real about practice.
Those who favour strict impartiality point to the structure of the statutory process. Surveyors settle disputes. Their awards can bind the parties. Once appointed, they cannot simply be dismissed because an owner dislikes the direction of travel. That looks less like ordinary agency and more like a special dispute-resolution function. If a person is making decisions that affect both owners, the instinctive expectation is that they should act fairly between them.
There is force in that position. A party wall award is not just a private wish list for one side. It is supposed to regulate rights, timing, method, access, cost, and protection. If surveyors approached that task as mere advocates, the process would quickly lose credibility. Owners would feel the result depended less on merits and more on who hired the more aggressive professional.
Yet the opposing argument also reflects reality. In practice, owners appoint their own surveyors because they want their concerns understood and advanced. A building owner expects their surveyor to keep the process proportionate and workable. An adjoining owner expects their surveyor to take privacy, damage risk, access, and inconvenience seriously. That relationship is not imaginary. It is one reason the two-surveyor model exists at all.
This is why the most sensible understanding may be a practical middle ground. Party-appointed surveyors often begin from their appointing owner’s concerns, but they cannot lawfully or professionally ignore the wider merits of the dispute. They may raise arguments, challenge proposals, and negotiate strongly, yet the final award must still be capable of standing up as a rational and defensible determination. It cannot simply be partisan theatre.
The distinction between roles also matters. An agreed surveyor is plainly expected to stand between the parties. A third surveyor, called in to resolve a disagreement, must also act with obvious independence. The harder question is what happens with the two initial surveyors. Some practitioners see them as a tribunal that must jointly reach a fair outcome. Others see them as owner-appointed specialists whose behaviour is constrained not by pure neutrality but by duties of reasonableness, professional accountability, and the possibility of referral, appeal, or suit.
What is beyond doubt is that the process contains safeguards. Surveyors do not operate in a vacuum. Awards can be appealed. Costs must be reasonable. A third surveyor may be asked to decide contested issues. Conduct that is careless, unfair, or excessive can damage professional standing and invite legal challenge. Those checks matter because they prevent the party wall process from collapsing into unchecked partisanship.
There is also a practical lesson for owners. Many appoint a surveyor assuming that person will either fight entirely for them or, at the other extreme, abandon them in the name of abstract neutrality. Both assumptions are too simple. A competent surveyor should understand an owner’s concerns, explain the limits of the law, negotiate effectively, and help shape an award that is both protective and workable. That is neither blind loyalty nor detached indifference.
In the end, the argument about impartiality reveals something deeper about party wall law itself. The system sits awkwardly between negotiation and adjudication. Surveyors are not ordinary agents, but neither are they judges in the full courtroom sense. Their role contains elements of both representation and decision-making.
That is why the debate is unlikely to disappear. But whichever label one prefers, the real test is practical: does the surveyor help produce an award that is lawful, proportionate, reasoned, and capable of being respected by both sides? If the answer is yes, the theory matters less. If the answer is no, no label will save the process.