Challenges and solutions
61. For a small number of people, noise nuisance
is a real and pressing problem. Neighbour noise, whether domestic
or caused by a club or pub next door, can seriously blight people's
lives. While certain elements of domestic neighbour nuisance
fall within the category of anti-social behaviour for which there
are now new or greater powers, some of the nuisance does not fall
to be dealt with in that way, not least commercial nuisance noise
which is often a licensing or even a planning matter (often part
and parcel of the move, encouraged by some local authorities,
to the 24-hour economy). Ambient noise, in particular that generated
by road, rail and air transport, is another vexing matter that
we have not been able to tackle in this Report.
62. There can be no doubt that local authorities
find noise nuisance difficult to tackle. A lot of is due to the
ephemeral nature of the nuisance and to the procedures that need
to be followed to substantiate a complaint and issue any necessary
notice. However, the greatest difficulty most (urban) authorities
face is cost. Since most complaints come outside the working
day (indeed, the greatest number of complaints usually occurs
outside the working week), an out-of-hours noise response team
is seen as a minimum requirement. Many authorities therefore
have established an out-of-hours service, and those authorities
which consider noise to be sufficient a priority have a 24 hour-a-day,
seven days-a-week noise team—an expensive business. Also
very few complaints result in the serving of statutory notices:
very few of these notices result in prosecutions; and fewer still
in the confiscation of equipment used in noise nuisance.
63. Ten years ago only 93 councils in England and
Wales operated an out-of-hours noise service. This has now risen
to some 216 councils.[68]
The amount of office time spent by EHOs and other relevant staff
on noise control has also risen by over one-third, from 7.1% to
9.6%. [Ev40] These statistics also reveal the minor part that
noise plays even in that compartment of local authority activity
which concerns itself with such nuisance. The current cost of
all these noise teams is £48.6 million a year. As the CIEH
memorandum puts it; "noise investigation is a skilled business
requiring properly trained, experienced officers, and sometimes
sophisticated equipment, [their work] often carried out at unsocial
times."[69] Noise
nuisance is a pretty intractable matter even when sufficient money
is diverted into tackling it.
64. While the CIEH expresses itself to be broadly
content with existing powers for dealing with neighbourhood noise,
it does recommend some areas for improvement and some areas of
concern. While some fixed penalties are currently available under
the Noise Act, as amended by the Anti-Social Behaviour Act, for
those committing noise nuisance who do not desist from so doing
following receipt of a Warning Notice, this applies to dwellings
only and thought should possibly be given to extending this through
the EPA to non-domestic sources of noise nuisance. Noise legislation
is also scattered under eighteen Acts and could with some merit
be consolidated; it is also complex law and barely understood
by the non-practitioner. Some of the procedures under the law
are also complicated.
65. Additionally, some recent legislative changes
appear to have had unintended consequences for those dealing with
noise nuisance: there is evidence that magistrates are occasionally
now refusing warrants to local authorities to enter premises to
deal with noise nuisance because of privacy aspects of recent
human rights legislation; the Regulation of Investigatory Powers
Act (RIPA) is also causing problems for EHOs as one reading of
the legislation has been that they—EHOs —can no longer
use tape recorders in order to record evidence of noise or of
the offence caused by a noise order being broken. CIEH states
that RIPA was developed without the views of the CIEH being sought
by the Home Office. Likewise, recent guidance for magistrates,
the Costing the Earth toolkit, was developed without any
CIEH input.[70] This
is regrettable. Even outwith legal recourses, mediation between
those causing the nuisance and those who are its victims is not
resorted to with sufficient frequency. We
are in particular attracted to CIEH's suggestion to extend the
current powers available under the Anti-Social Behaviour Act from
domestic to non-domestic buildings. Noise nuisance is noise nuisance,
whatever its source, and unreasonable and intrusive levels of
noise whether from a home or from a pub or factory should be dealt
with in the same way, especially where current legislative safeguards
appear ineffectual or cumbersome.
66. In the context of our inquiry, noise was clearly
not a priority for most of those bodies involved in dealing with
local environmental blight. On one level, this is an institutional
phenomenon. Bodies concerned with litter, graffiti, fly-posting
and fly-tipping seldom have any connection with noise and noise
blight. Even within local authorities which have to deal with
all of these matters, staff dealing with noise usually belong
to a different department or section within the local authority
whose concerns may not be as environmentally nuanced as elsewhere.
Only recently, within the anti-social behaviour framework which
has seen much progress in dealing with local environmental issues,
has the issue of domestic noise begun to be brought to the forefront
of concerns alongside litter, fly-posting and other visual degradation.
This is very much to be welcomed, and is indeed vitally important
to dealing with noise blight effectively. Noise will always remain
difficult to tackle, bound up as it is with such issues as planning,
house design and the 24 hour economy, with its fluid social patterns.
More information on noise in needed, and also a better grasp
of where the difficulties and gaps lie in the legislation. But
above all, government, local
and national, needs to join noise up more effectively with other
local issues, to deal with aural blight as it is dealing with
visual blight, and to make the connection that areas of the country
where there are excessive noise complaints often border upon or
are themselves areas subject to the degrading influence of litter,
graffiti and everything else that goes with them.
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