Council withdraws noise abatement notice on the eve of two-day appeal

Sam Aynsley, instructed by Richard Dobson-Mason of O’Donnell’s Solicitors, acted for the successful appellant hotel in its appeal under s.80(3) of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 against a noise abatement notice. The day before a two-day contested hearing the Council withdrew the notice, which the Court then ordered should stand as if quashed.

The notice, served in September 2025, alleged “loud music… causing a noise nuisance to neighbouring residents” and required the hotel, a popular wedding and events venue operating for 62 years, to abate the alleged nuisance immediately, on pain of criminal liability. The hotel pursued the appeal on the grounds that the notice was not justified by s.80 of the 1990 Act and, in the alternative, that its requirements were unreasonable in character or extent, or unnecessary.

The local authority’s approach

Over the eleven months the appeal was on foot, a series of shortcomings in the Council’s conduct of the process emerged:

• Complaint-led escalation, not proper consideration. The whole process traced back to a nearby resident who moved to the area in 2021/2022 and almost immediately began complaining about the incidental noise of weddings at a hotel that had hosted weddings for the previous 62 years. Pressure from that constituent, and from an MP following the constituent’s complaint to them, appears to have driven matters forward, in place of any proper consideration of whether a statutory nuisance in fact existed.
• No consultation before service. The notice was served without the Council attending the premises, consulting the hotel, or giving it any opportunity to respond to the complaints said to underlie it.
• A notice effectively treated as available “as of right”. The Council proceeded as though it were simply entitled to serve one, rather than exercising a power that demands an evidenced, reasoned decision; an attitude that fed directly into its failure to particularise what was actually prohibited.
• A vague and unworkable notice. The notice amounted to a blanket prohibition on “loud music”, with no decibel levels, times, or days specified, and no steps identified by which the hotel could comply. Given the criminal consequences of breach, the hotel was left guessing at what, precisely, was prohibited.
• An irrational collision with the hotel’s own licence. The hotel holds a rare surviving 24-hour premises licence under the Licensing Act 2003, authorising licensable activities around the clock and loud music until 2am. A blanket, unparticularised prohibition on “loud music” sat squarely at odds with what the licensing regime expressly permitted.
• Disclosure failings. The Council repeatedly refused to give disclosure and purported to have fulfilled its obligations when it clearly had not, including withholding the identities and addresses of its complainants and the locations from which its officer’s recordings were said to have been made. Court orders were required to compel disclosure.
• Capitulation at the door of the court. Having maintained the notice throughout, the Council withdrew it the day before trial following service of the appellant’s skeleton argument, and the notice stood as if quashed by order of the Court.

The value of early expert involvement

The appellant instructed acoustic expert Mr Andrew Raymond, of ADC Acoustics, a Warrington-based acoustic engineering consultancy, at an early stage. Collaborative work with the appellant’s legal team shaped the disclosure sought from the Council and ensured that his report addressed the issues that actually mattered to the appeal.

As well as technical acoustic expertise and practical knowledge of how notices are normally served by local authorities, Mr Raymond’s evidence was particularly valuable on the limits of acoustic evidence in cases of this kind: informal recordings captured on uncalibrated consumer devices subject to automatic gain control, unaccompanied by calibrated sound pressure level measurements (LAeq), representative background levels (LA90) at the receptor, or any assessment against a recognised methodology such as BS 4142, cannot establish the actual sound levels experienced at a complainant’s property, let alone that those levels crossed the threshold of statutory nuisance.

Tested against those principles, the Council’s evidence could never have proved a nuisance:

• A basic misunderstanding of the legal test. The Council’s early stance was that its Trojan noise recordings (recording devices triggered by a complainant, most often used in neighbour noise disputes) established a nuisance because some registered above 30dB (a level comparable to a whisper). Statutory nuisance is not a number on a meter, still less one that low: it is an objective legal standard.
• A thin and untested evidential foundation with no baseline. The Council relied on recordings and spreadsheets logging a listener’s perception of them, served without any explanation of their provenance, authorship, or the equipment used, and containing background noise attributable to other sources in the locality. These recordings were seemingly made with the complainant’s windows open, so that they were contaminated by wind interference. The Council never recorded the ordinary background noise of the locality absent the alleged nuisance, leaving it no means of distinguishing the hotel’s events from the everyday sound of the area.
• An expert who had never heard the noise. The Council’s expert had never himself heard the noise he was asked to condemn; his evidence rested on recordings and the reported perceptions of others.
• The waveforms told their own story. Analysis of the recordings’ waveforms showed levels sitting within the ordinary rise and fall of background sound at the receptor. Whatever was driving the complaints, it could not have been the noise itself.

Statutory nuisance: an objective test

Underlying it all is the legal threshold. As any land lawyer will be aware, statutory nuisance is an objective test: it is not enough that an individual complainant finds noise irritating or would prefer it not to occur. The question is whether the noise goes beyond what an ordinary person would find it reasonable to have to put up with, judged objectively and in the context of the locality (London Borough of Southwark v Mills [1999] 3 WLR 939; Coventry v Lawrence [2014] AC 264).

Measured against that standard, the reality on the ground pointed entirely the other way:

• Occasional, pre-booked functions — weddings and events on discrete dates, not persistent or continuous noise. Around 35 functions across the whole of 2025, the overwhelming majority weddings, with numbers falling year on year since 2023.
• Not late night — 95% of functions finished by 11pm. On rare occasions they ran on until midnight. The hotel had already, unprompted, brought its finish time forward from 1am to midnight in 2022.
• A vital part of the local community — weddings are the profitable heart of the hotel’s business. In a remote location, the hotel has long provided services and employment locally, including full- and part-time work for local young people, and is both a family business and the family’s home of 62 years.
• A venue that actively managed its sound — a professionally installed sound system with an electronic noise limiter set to a fixed ceiling; the same resident DJ for 27 years; only two outdoor speakers, housed in purpose-built huts to concentrate the sound and screened by bamboo planting; and staff monitoring audibility from nearby vantage points during events after the notice had been served.
• Cleared by the Council itself in 2023 — an earlier investigation, with monitoring equipment installed and the hotel’s full cooperation, ended with the Council concluding there was insufficient evidence of a statutory nuisance. The levels recorded in 2023 appeared higher than those relied on in 2025; nothing material had changed in the interim except the persistence of the complaints and the unhelpful involvement of a Member of Parliament.
• Barely audible on the ground — standing on the complainants’ own lane, some 600 metres from the hotel, the directors could make out only a faint, distant sound; passing traffic, wind and birdsong were louder.
• A handful of complainants the Council declined to identify — whose subjective perceptions were never tested against any objective standard, and who complained even of a few minutes of music during a daytime wedding ceremony. Neighbours living closer to the hotel than the complainants confirmed they had experienced no disturbance at all; evidence the Council’s officer declined even to read. The obvious inference was of a constituent who had become fixated on a distant sound.

To conclude: a local authority must be able to make the objective case on proper evidence before exposing a business to the criminal consequences of an abatement notice. Councils appear to be serving these notices with increasing regularity, labouring under the misapprehension that they are a procedural step in response to a complaint rather than a trigger of criminal liability warranting carefully considered and reasoned decision-making and analysis.

Sam Aynsley appeared for the appellant. He enjoys a common law practice focused on litigation that carries legal, procedural, and evidential complexity.