The Ombudsman's final decision
Summary: We will not investigate this complaint about the Council’s handling of a noise nuisance complaint made by Ms X. This is because an investigation is unlikely to add to the investigation already carried out by the Council or lead to a different outcome.
The complaint
Ms X complains the Council did not properly investigate her report of a noise nuisance one evening from adjacent neighbours. She says the neighbours are still noisy, talking in the early hours, and she fears the Council may be ignoring other more recent noise complaints she has made.
The Ombudsman’s role and powers
We investigate complaints about ‘maladministration’ and ‘service failure’, which we call ‘fault’. We must also consider whether any fault has had an adverse impact on the person making the complaint, which we call ‘injustice’. We provide a free service but must use public money carefully. We do not start or continue an investigation if we decide: there is not enough evidence of fault to justify investigating, or any fault has not caused injustice to the person who complained, or any injustice is not significant enough to justify our involvement, or we could not add to any previous investigation by the organisation, or further investigation would not lead to a different outcome. (Local Government Act 1974, section 24A(6), as amended, section 34(B))
How I considered this complaint
I considered information provided by the complainant, including the Council’s response to her complaint.
I considered the Ombudsman’s Assessment Code.
My assessment
Ms X complained to the Council about its response to her reports of noise nuisance coming from an event at a neighbour’s property one evening.
The Council said an officer had visited the site but witnessed no noise nuisance which required further investigation or enforcement action and it explained the difference in how it treats one-off reports of noise nuisance rather than repeated reports.
The Council did acknowledge an error in its complaint handling and that one of her calls had not been passed to the relevant team. It apologised for this and explained it had raised the latter issue with call staff management. It also advised that it had recently revised its call handling procedure to better align with information on its website and to aid in the logging of reported incidents.
We do not investigate every complaint we receive and while Ms X may be dissatisfied with the Council’s response to her complaint, there are insufficient grounds to warrant an investigation by the Ombudsman.
If she has concerns about the Council’s response to her new reports of noise nuisance, it is open to her to make a new complaint to the Council about this and to come to us if she is not satisfied with its response. By law, the Council must be given the opportunity of responding to any new issues before we will consider them.
Final decision
We will not investigate Ms X’s complaint because an investigation is unlikely to add to the investigation already carried out by the Council or lead to a different outcome.
Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman