Peabody Trust (202429816)

Background

1. The resident contacted the landlord on behalf of 7 shared owners to report excessive noise transmission due to a lack of soundproofing. He said the landlord and the developer had not carried out sufficiently robust investigations into the adequacy of the soundproofing in the building.

What the complaint is about

2. The complaint is about the landlord’s response to the resident’s reports of noise transfer due to a lack of soundproofing.

Our decision (determination)

3. After considering the evidence, we have found the complaint is outside of our jurisdiction. As a result, we have not investigated it.

Reasons

4. We are not free to investigate all complaints referred to us. What we can and cannot consider is set out in the Housing Ombudsman Scheme (the Scheme). We deal with complaints from individual tenants and leaseholders. This means we cannot accept complaints from groups of residents, collective representations or residents’ associations. However, in some cases we may consider one resident’s complaint as a lead case for a wider group, where we are satisfied that the facts and circumstances are exactly the same.
5. In this case, our view is that the facts and circumstances would not be exactly the same for all of the affected residents. The complaint concerns noise, which would affect people in different ways. For example, some residents may be more sensitive to noise or they may have medical conditions or other vulnerabilities that are exacerbated by noise. They may also be experiencing different levels of noise depending on the location of their property within the building and the behaviour of the occupants living above them.
6. We have also considered whether we should treat the resident as the lead complainant for the wider group of residents affected by the reported noise issues. However, the resident advised the landlord and us that his property was not affected by the noise. Therefore, the noise has not had an adverse impact on the resident and under the Scheme we may not investigate matters that do not cause significant adverse effect to the complainant.
7. For the reasons given, we have concluded that we have no jurisdiction to investigate the resident’s complaint. The residents directly affected by the reported noise could consider submitting individual complaints to the landlord.