Noise

We can investigate many types of noise where it affects you in your home, including excessive barking from dogs, music, televisions, excessive DIY and intruder alarms.

We cannot normally deal with

• children playing
• speech
• day-to-day domestic noise such as lawn mowing, vacuum-cleaning 
• rowdy behaviour in the street
• traffic noise (including roadworks and maintenance)
• railway noise (including maintenance works)
• aircraft noise.

Before you make a complaint

You should first try to resolve the problem early on by talking to whoever is responsible for the noise, before going down the formal complaint route.

How to make a complaint

You can contact us with your name and address, the address the noise is coming from and how the noise is affecting the use of your property

• Make a noise complaint

The diary of disturbance forms available can be used to start making records of how and when you are disturbed by the noise.

• Noise recording diary sheets

Out of hours noise complaints

If you are contacting us outside of office hours Monday to Friday your complaint will be passed to officers on the next working day.

The Council does not operate a 24-hour call out service for the investigation of noise complaints. Once we are investigating complaints having received a completed diary sheet suggesting there is a problem we can make arrangements to visit out of hours or use recording equipment (subject to the prioritisation of workloads and availability of officers and equipment).

Can I make an anonymous complaint?

We do not routinely investigate anonymous complaints. We need to satisfy ourselves that the complaint is genuine and because the law requires us to assess the impact of noise on the complainant.