NOISY neighbours caused a headache for hundreds of Herefordians during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic.

Herefordshire Council recorded 813 noise complaints linked to neighbours between April 2020 and March this year, according to new figures.

That was 420 complaints for every 100,000 people .

The number of complaints rose from 713 the year before as people across the area were confined to their homes for sustained periods of lockdown.

A Freedom of Information request submitted to hundreds of local authorities by Churchill Home Insurance found there were more than 368,000 complaints about noisy neighbours lodged to 267 councils across the UK in 2020-21, a 28 per cent rise from the previous year.

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Steven Williams, from Churchill, said: "The pandemic has seen us confined to our homes which means we’ve probably all become very aware of noises around us.

"As we go into more of a ‘new normal’, many of us will carry on working from home, at least part of the time, so noisy neighbours will continue to be really disruptive.

“It may be the case that neighbours don’t realise they are being noisy, so the first step should always be speaking to them and explaining the problem.

"If that doesn’t work and they carry on, then keep a record of the type of noise and time of day and speak to your local council about raising a potential noise complaint.”

Based on the number of statutory nuisance complaints linked to neighbourly noise, the figures suggest the place with the noisiest neighbours in the UK was Kensington and Chelsea, where more than 15,000 complaints were made, roughly 9,900 for every 100,000 people.

The Government has assembled the Interdepartmental Panel on Costs and Benefits (Noise) to consider the implications of the latest evidence around noise and will use the findings to update Government guidance where necessary.

Local authorities are responsible for investigating complaints about issues that could be a statutory nuisance and have a duty to carry out inspections to detect and investigate nuisance complaints, including those concerning excessive noise.