Background

Population: 129,000; Area: 211 km²; number of noise complaints per year: 975; number of abatement notices: 12; number of court cases: 3

The key driver for our adoption of The Noise App was the desire to improve customer service. Shrinking resources and a recruitment freeze added further pressures to a service already stretched by the challenge of responding to nearly a thousand complaints each year.

Customer engagement

Implementing the Noise App has undoubtedly delivered significant benefits in terms of customer service, as feedback from the public has been very positive. With limited resources, deploying our traditional noise-monitoring equipment has been an ongoing challenge. The Noise App has helped enormously with this, providing an easy and quick alternative. It means we can screen cases much more effectively so that we can deploy our monitoring equipment where it is most needed.

Triage tool

The Noise App has helped us prioritise complaints, target our actions toward the most severe issues, and make informed decisions about the need for site visits or other action. We sometimes use The Noise App to support mediation, playing the recordings to the noise maker, and we find this can help resolve the situation.

Enforcement

Despite dealing with nearly one thousand noise complaints each year, we know that we serve abatement notices in only a small number of cases, around 1%. However, The Noise App has helped us to focus our efforts, enhancing our enforcement activities when needed. We have used the app successfully in court on several occasions as supporting evidence in relation to both warrants for seizure and to prosecute for breach of notice.

Partnership-working

A significant benefit has been improved partnership-working. The Noise App enables two or more agencies to examine the same issue. It enables us to support action by others, for example in cases where noise-nuisance remedy is not appropriate. We have worked successfully with housing associations in relation to tenancy issues and with social services/mental health services. In one case, evidence gained through The Noise App informed the redesign of a package of care for a social services client.