A Little People Victory

So, as you may see from my many Facebook statuses, we have had a lot of problems with the pub across the road.

After about a year of complaining to the environmental health department at the local council (from myself and other neighbours), they finally started to take notice of what we were saying.

They put noise recording equipment in some of our homes to see how loud the noise from the pub was. The pub had also applied for a variation of the premises license to extend the opening hours and the hours of playing live and recorded music,

After I found this out, I made a representation to the licensing department of the local council. They say if they have any written representations, they would have an inquiry into whether the extension should be granted or not.

Well, the inquiry was this past Tuesday (October 1st). It was something I had never been to before and it was quite interested to see how they were run. They have a chair person, an office from licensing, a solicitor and a couple of other members on the panel.

Also included were the landlord of the pub, environmental health officer, and those that sent in written representations.

I was expecting the inquiry to take about an hour or a little over. They evidence portion took about 3 hours. It started with the landlord putting his case across. We were then invited to question him, as did the panel.

The environmental officer then presented her evidence and was able to be questioned. The same happened for those presenting representations and we had the opportunity to be questioned.

In my evidence, I talked about how it affected life at home. How I have to wear headphones to watch TV at night and how it still keeps us awake. We never get to bed before 2 am on a weekend because of the noise. He wanted to extend to 2am – this means no sleep until 4am. This was just not on for me or any of the other neighbours.

We got a call later on that day to say that the variation had been rejected with a couple of minor amendments.

Below are all the documents from the inquiry.

Enjoy reading!