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Mr. John Carlisle: Have not we had a semi-indication of that today from the hon. Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Ms Ruddock)? She tried to refute my allegation that, in many cases, environmental health officers seemed to be spending a lot more time building small empires with what seem to be trivial regulations--some of which have been passed by the House. My hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that there is a possibility of political connotations. We as Conservatives see the very real problem that noise is creating and believe that local authorities should attach great importance to helping to
alleviate that problem. Is that not confirmed by the fact that the Conservative Benches have been semi-packed all morning, while the Opposition Benches have been very sparsely attended?
Mr. Marshall: I do not wish to attack the London borough of Lewisham too much. I fought Lewisham in 1974 and Lewisham fought back and won, but I noticed recently that an hon. Member who lives there decided that the education system in Lewisham was not good enough for his children.
Ms Ruddock: I am sure that the hon. Gentleman would expect me to comment on the intervention by the hon. Member for Luton, North (Mr. Carlisle). There is no question in my mind that local authorities--whether they are Labour, Liberal Democrat or Tory-controlled--ought to carry out their duties with respect to their citizens in all areas, including health and safety, food regulation and noise. If authorities find that they do not have enough resources, perhaps the fault lies with the Government.
Mr. Marshall: I am surprised that the hon. Lady decided to intervene, as I suspect that she will make a speech later. I resent the suggestion that local authorities have been short-changed by the Government, and I speak with the authority of one who served for four years as chairman of a finance committee. Before we gained control of Ealing council, we were told by the Labour party that it was terribly efficient, but soon after we gained control, we found that we could squeeze millions of pounds out of local authority spending without affecting the quality of service.
If the hon. Lady looks at the statistics from the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy, she will see that there are huge fluctuations in the relative efficiency of different local authorities. If authorities such as Lewisham were to become as efficient as other authorities, they would have plenty of money to spend, both on improving the quality of the education service and on dealing with problems such as noise. It is no argument for her to say that the council does not have enough money--the council must become more efficient.
Mr. Marshall:
Before the hon. Lady jumps up again, I should remind her that the Audit Commission has pointed out that local education authorities could save hundreds of millions of pounds by getting rid of surplus school places. If they did so, they could improve the quality of education, and the hon. Lady would have nothing to jump up about--but she can jump up again if she wants.
Ms Ruddock:
The hon. Gentleman makes a great mistake in attacking Lewisham, as the very bodies to which he has referred frequently congratulate the council--as does the Department of the Environment--on its excellent delivery of public services and its good housekeeping and careful husbandry of resources.
Mr. Marshall:
All I can say is that a colleague of the hon. Lady decided that--while it may be good enough for her constituents--the education service in Lewisham was not good enough for his two children.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Janet Fookes):
Order. May I inquire what this has to do with the Second Reading of the Bill? I think nothing.
Mr. Marshall:
I shall not beg to differ with you, Madam Deputy Speaker, because I shall wish to catch your eye for an Adjournment Debate later. Local authority spending is an important part of the Bill, as authorities have been given a permissive, rather than a mandatory, power. It is up to them to decide how they exercise that power.
I shall refer quickly to one or two items. The £40 fixed penalty is too low. Some 40 or 50 noisy people at a late-night party in London would have to pay only £1 each--what is a quid at two o'clock in the morning?--and the fine will be paid. I should like the fixed penalty to be as much as £100, as that is more realistic.
I welcome the power of seizure contained in the Bill. If local authorities were to take away the noisy equipment, and did so once or twice, that would act as a severe disincentive for people to carry on with late night parties.
Ms Joan Ruddock (Lewisham, Deptford):
I join other hon. Members in congratulating the hon. Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Greenway) on his success in the ballot and on introducing the Bill, which I am pleased to say has our general support. I also wish to express my understanding of his absence at this time, and to add to the tributes that others have paid to Philip Lawrence.
The Bill would implement some of the main recommendations contained in the report of the Government's working party on noise, which was published nearly a year ago. In particular, as we have heard, it will create a new criminal offence of night-time noise, and it will clarify the law relating to the seizure and confiscation of noise-making equipment. We believe that it would have been much more satisfactory had the Government managed to conclude their consultations in better time and had introduced comprehensive measures to tackle noise in last year's Environment Bill, as we urged them to do.
Measures to tackle the chronic and worsening problem of noise nuisance are long overdue, as all hon. Members have said. Noise, defined as unwanted sound, can cause extreme stress, exhaustion and other health problems. Many of us have had to deal with constituents suffering utter frustration and misery owing to noise nuisance. The problem is a real one for thousands of people, and it is still growing.
Other hon. Members have quoted the figures for 1993-94. In that year, there were 131,000 complaints about noise from domestic premises--a rise of more than 10 per cent. on the previous year--and it was the seventh consecutive year in which complaints rose. As my hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Mr. Cox) reminded us, noise disputes are reported to have been responsible for 17 deaths, and the true figure may be higher.
The Association of Metropolitan Authorities tells us that complaints about noisy neighbours have increased by 700 per cent. since 1978. Of the 131,153 complaints in 1993-94, more than 32,000 were dealt with through mediation and informal resolution, and more than 5,000 abatement notices were served. However, the vast majority of complaints were not resolved, and the number of court actions remains tiny. In that same period, there were just 441 prosecutions, and 372 convictions. Of all the complaints made, only one in 297 resulted in a court prosecution and one in 352 in a conviction. That cannot be right.
About 60 per cent. of all mediated neighbour disputes involve noise, and estimates of the success rate range from 40 to 77 per cent. Mediation is cost-effective and usually costs between £200 and £300. If intervention is early enough, it can save local authorities a great deal of money, as well as save the time of the police and the courts. Mediation services are a valuable resource when dealing with noise nuisance, and I wish to place on record my recognition of their role. I also wish to pay tribute to my local service, which has been extremely helpful to me and to many of my constituents. Obviously, mediation does not solve all noise disputes. The Bill does not tackle all noise disputes, but deals only with night-time noise.
The causes of some noises are more amenable to mediation than others. Night-time noise problems are especially difficult to mediate. Frequently, people are more belligerent and, in my experience, often suffering from the effects of alcohol or drugs. Noise nuisance and other forms of anti-social behaviour are often perpetrated by vulnerable people who are unsupervised under the guise of care in the community. Such people can cause havoc in a neighbourhood and neither mediation nor the provisions of the Bill will deal with their problems, which are more deep-seated and require much greater application from the Government to provide for them both in the health service and in community services.
I hope that the Bill will succeed in providing the first penalty for the careless, selfish and sometimes criminal householder who causes night-time nuisance. I know exactly what such noise means in practice. In my very own street, in my inner-city constituency, we have had a succession of noise nuisances over the past four years.
One couple, who live at the opposite end of the street, told me that, for the two years before I moved in, there had been continuous problems with their neighbours. When they came to me, they had already suffered for two years. They had a petition signed by 18 neighbouring households testifying to the extent of the problem. In a note that they put through my letterbox, the woman wrote:
Her husband is a postman getting up at 4.30 in the morning. They have a child of five who has to go to school. She also goes out to work, yet they could get no peace at home and no sleep at night. Life had become utterly impossible.
That problem was brought to me in June 1994. It was resolved only two months ago, despite all the efforts of the relevant authorities, as well as my efforts. During that period of persistent noise nuisance, various neighbours who were home owners, and an elderly woman who had to be rehoused by the local authority, moved away.My constituent wrote to me:
That constituent was courageous and persisted in trying to deal with a problem that was not hers alone but the whole street's. However, the problems got worse and worse.
After the first offending household had been somewhat quieted through the procedures of the local authority and threatened with eviction--it was a council tenancy--the woman's immediate neighbour vacated his home and let it to a so-called care in the community organisation. That organisation, for a substantial amount of money, brought four young people--which became a succession of young people--into the house, all of whom were on probation and none of whom was supervised in the residence. The Government require no registration of such small homes. From then on, there was a reign of tyranny in our street.
Fortunately, we keep such long hours in the House that I would often get home when the worst was over. People could not believe that I had not heard every bit of the loud music, the shouting, the motor bikes, the throwing, the arguing and, once, an axe being thrown into the neighbour's garden. That havoc could not be easily arrested. Recordings were taken; things quietened down. By the time that the case was to come to court, it was said that new recordings were required and so on and so forth.
I shall not continue with that sad story, but it is a miracle that someone did not commit an act of violence against the perpetrators. Those responsible for the young people showed a complete lack of responsibility. What is more, that illustrates the amount of time, effort, expense and frustration involved when one uses the present law.
For all those reasons, we welcome the Bill.We congratulate Val Gibson and the Right to Peace and Quiet Campaign, as well as all those constituents who have tried valiantly to find some solution to the problems. Much more comprehensive action is required, however, to deal with cases of persistent anti-social behaviour, when noise is used as a weapon alongside threats and often actual violence.
In July last year, Labour proposed to tackle such anti-social behaviour, suggesting a number of remedies in our document "A Quiet Life". They were widely recognised, appreciated and applauded by everyone except the Government, who dismissed them as "merely window dressing"--those were Ministers' words.On reflection, however--perhaps because of the amount of support--Ministers have taken them up, I am glad to say, albeit in a more limited form, in part V of the new Housing Bill, which has little else to recommend it.
Although we welcome the Noise Bill and its intentions, the Labour party remains concerned about aspects of the legislation. My hon. Friend the Member for Newham, North-West (Mr. Banks) raised the substantial technical concerns expressed by his local authority. I hope that we shall hear some response from the Minister to those concerns. I must raise a number of other concerns as well as some that I have in common with my hon. Friend.
My hon. Friend the Member for Tooting mentioned resources. The financial memorandum states:
A few minutes ago, the hon. Member for Hendon, South (Mr. Marshall) and I had an exchange on that very question. How do local authorities prioritise, when they are required to implement so much legislation on behalf of their citizens?
I fear that the financial memorandum grossly underestimates the amount of money that would be required for effective implementation of the Billas proposed. Dividing even the maximum figure of£3 million by each of the 405 local authorities in England and Wales would give just over £7,000 per authority.In the survey of local authorities published yesterday by the National Society for Clean Air, an alarming 70 per cent. of those who responded identified lack of staff and resources as a major constraint on their ability to control noise nuisance--it was by far the biggest reason cited for local authorities having difficulties dealing with the problem. I am sure that that was the problem that confronted the London borough of Barnet.
I know that the hon. Friends of the hon. Member for Ealing, North are taking notes on his behalf. I wonder whether he has estimated how many local authorities will adopt the provisions and how much, on average, implementation will cost each authority. Alternatively, perhaps the Minister would like to give the Government's view--I suspect that they assisted with the calculations.
Furthermore, as the offence is specifically night-time noise, it will be essential for local authorities to provide out-of-hours services if they are to implement the proposals with any effect. In an area like mine, local authority officers would probably feel unable to go if they had to go alone. They either have to get a police escort or go in pairs, such are the dangers of dealing with night-time noise in many areas. Given that local authorities are currently cutting services to meet the Government's latest demands in respect of revenue support settlements, that may well be impossible.
Even if local authorities do implement the measures effectively, they will not benefit from the moneys raised by fixed-fine penalties. I wonder whether the hon. Member for Ealing, North considered allowing local authorities to retain the sums so raised, as they are able to do with parking fines. If so, why did he decide against it?
The level of fines proposed is one of the few points on which I agree with Conservative Members's criticisms of the Bill. I do not believe that £40 is consistent with deterrence, and I doubt very much whether victims of noise nuisance would consider it sufficient punishment.
We are unable to understand why the proposed powers are adoptive rather than mandatory. The hon. Member for Ealing, North outlined his reasoning, which is that not all local authorities face the same severity of problem. If any local authority is faced with just one such problem, that authority owes it to the council tax payer householder to see to it that the problem is dealt with. That means that there should be mandatory powers and that action should not be a matter of choice.
"We are a normal family. We don't object to parties--anything within limits--but this is too much to bear."
"people are being driven out, the police carry no weight whatsoever, though I may add, without them on the end of the phone I too feel I may have gone by now. I have also had great support from the EHO, who have sent us the 'Noise Pack', twice now they have sent letters to No. 18, so the next step is to take court proceedings which I have reservations of doing for obvious reasons."
"The additional cost for local authorities to enforce the night noise offence is estimated to be between £1 and £3 million per year."
16 Feb 1996 : Column 1285
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