Oliver Condy Editor

Good news from the Ministry of Common Sense. It seems that if you’re daft enough (or lucky enough) to move next to a music venue or indeed a church with a weekly bellringing practice, you can’t now go off in a sulk and apply to the council for a noise abatement order. Complain all you want but, as housing secretary Sajid Javid says, the burden is now on you or the developer to either ensure your property is sufficiently sound-proofed or to simply find somewhere else to live/build your house. There has been an unacceptable abundance of cases where bureaucrats have far too easily caved in to pressure from new residents – sometimes a complaint from a single individual has been sufficient to silence centuries-old clock bells. One only has to think of Kenwood House up in Hampstead, London, the venue until 2013 for yearly classical music extravaganzas, which was forced to cancel its event in 2007 because of complaints about noise from neighbours. And consider the dozens of parishes who have been threatened with a ‘statutory nuisance’ order under the Environmental Protection Act 1990 because, as one correspondent to a nation paper put it, ‘I didn’t move to the countryside for this.’ Well, music clubs, concert hall, festivals and other longestablished providers of local (noisy) entertainment, you can finally make fine noise without fear.