Britains Noisiest Places to Live
Our noise survey revealed some interesting information about the numbers of noise complaints being received by local authorities. We asked each local authority in the UK how many noise complaints they received, how much enforcement action they took and about officer staffing levels. In our report we compare the data received to government data and national indices. The analysis has been completed and we can provide you with some key findings, including regional data and where Britains noisiest places are.
You can obtain a full copy of all of the raw data here. It is presented in a dashboard that allows different areas to be benchmarked against each other. In the meantime, view a summary of the data, discussion and results here. A few of the key findings include:
- Analysis shows a strong correlation between population density and the number of complaints received. Urban areas are much more likely to generate high levels of noise complaints.
- Local authorities were ranked according to the number of complaints received per 1000 population. Results were compared to other local authority indices. In the case of deprivation, for example, no correlation was found. Conversely, the relationship between the number of noise complaints to the percentage of social housing is moderately strong.
- As one might expect, the more complaints a Council receives the more enforcement notices are served. As a result we were able to identify authorities who are taking much more or less enforcement action than average.
- There is a significant (but moderate) correlation between the level of enforcement (notices served) and the number of complaints received.
- The extent to which we could rely upon the data provided relating to staffing levels was limited. However we are able to estimate that an average of 2.2 officers serve every 100,000 people. Each officer deals with an average of 330 noise complaints per year and may undertake a number of other duties in addition to this work.
Other organisations have attempted to repeat our work but the data we provide in our download is much more comprehensive.
In our results we display data regionally, nationally and within the same rural/urban classification so that a reasonable comparison may be made as to which are Britain’s Noisiest Places.
Noise Nuisance 