A RESIDENT WRITES.......

Dear Dame

I read your recent blog “The Wrong Sort of Noise” (posted on Monday 22nd April 2019) about your request for a zero tolerance strategy to “hellish neighbours”. Perhaps your views as expressed in this blog explain why you have never blogged about RBKC’s behaviour in the high profile piano dispute which the council lost and which spanned 2.5 years and cost the RBKC taxpayer £220,000.

I fully appreciate the difficulties faced by residents with hellish inconsiderate neighbours, but you have misplaced faith in noise nuisance officers, and you have not appreciated that there also exists the flip-side of the “hellish neighbour” dynamic as experienced by the Carrabino family in the RBKC piano dispute. Enabled by grossly incompetent (and possibly worse) noise nuisance officers, this flip-side of the “hellish neighbour” dynamic exists in our borough and appears to be a growing problem around the country. Take for example the noise abatement notice served by Greenwich Council on the parents of an autistic man in 2011 because he hummed and groaned, or the piano teacher whose neighbours refused to submit to mediation (as did the complainant in this RBKC dispute) and so his piano was confiscated by West Berkshire Council in 2014, or the woman who recently won her case against Westminster Council when noise nuisance officers served a noise abatement notice preventing her from having parties or playing music in her home.

Then also consider that all that is required is one officer to have claimed to have witnessed a nuisance and a council is entitled to serve a noise abatement notice capable of causing tremendous harm and suffering to the recipient of the notice. And even more concerning is that there is no requirement on these officers to provide any evidence whatsoever, not acoustic recordings, not officer field notes. In the case of this piano dispute RBKC officers took acoustic recordings, did not disclose their existence, and when asked for them in court, claimed they were corrupted and so had been destroyed. It is not difficult to see how this power, in the hands of ignorant or corrupt officers with no accountability to anyone, can be abused. 

The senior noise officers in the RBKC piano dispute, Tim Davis, Keith Mehaffy and Georgina Seraphim, have a truly alarming and perverted interpretation of the law and an inconsistent approach as to whom they apply it. For example, RBKC noise officers attended the home of Ms Fouladi several years ago when she complained about her noisy neighbours upstairs. Mr Mehaffy told her that her neighbour opening a fridge door late at night constituted a nuisance (a statutory nuisance has criminal implications!). Eventually council officers told Ms Fouladi that they would not act on her behalf and she would have to take private action at her own expense. She did so and she won! Why did council officers not tell the wealthy (and well-connected) Mr Baptista and his now ex-wife Ms Allen to take private action, particularly after they refused to negotiate or to submit to mediation. In fact so attentive were the noise nuisance officers to Mr Baptista and Ms Allen that Mr Mehaffy visited them privately in their home at the time the council appointed a QC to lead the appeal of the court judgment to the High Court - what business required Mr Mehaffy’s personal attention in the complainant’s home that could not be carried out by phone or email?

Perhaps you did not blog about this dispute because you considered the piano-playing children to be the “hellish neighbour” for whom officers should have (and did have) a zero tolerance policy. First, the court judgment made it clear that this approach (ie. if piano-playing disturbs a neighbour it is immediately a statutory nuisance) is wrong. Secondly, not only did noise officers display total ignorance of the laws of statutory nuisance, but they have now made your desire for zero tolerance infinitely more difficult to execute, impossible in fact. Please consider that these officers whom you are willing to entrust so much power to have now, through incompetence and lack of professional integrity, created a legal precedent where the new starting point is that musicians are entitled to play a musical instrument for five hours per day between 9am and 9pm and to hold concerts six times per year until 10.30pm. It will be a difficult task to argue that another musician does not have that same entitlement.

Before the piano dispute story unfolded, musicians were running scared of councils, and musicians’ neighbours had overwhelming power over them. For the record, this has never been the legal position, but few musicians had the financial means to challenge councils once councils were given this power by the Environmental Protection Act 1990. RBKC’s highly publicised loss in this dispute has changed the landscape now, and conversations on musicians’ blogs are emboldened with talk of instrument practice being an “entitlement”. Not only did RBKC noise officers lose hundreds of thousands of pounds of your money, our money and our fellow residents’ money, on this ill-conceived unnecessary dispute, but these officers have made your wish for peace and quiet infinitely more difficult to realise.

Yours sincerely

Engaged Resident