DOMINIC LAWSON: At last! A minister who is standing up for the silent majority – by stopping NOISE 

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Finally, the Government has come up with a policy which can command overwhelming support, regardless of political affiliation.

The Transport Secretary, Grant Shapps, has announced a plan to clamp down on infernally repetitive, pointless and disruptive announcements on trains.

Better still, he declared that ‘there will also be new curbs on the maximum [volume] at which remaining announcements will be heard…to make [your] journey a little more peaceful’.

As the accompanying Department for Transport background paper pointed out, rail passengers have had to endure ‘contradictory calls for them to keep volume levels on electronic devices low, while on-board announcements blare out’.

Actually, not everyone agrees with Mr Shapps. The RMT union immediately complained that this might be ‘another ruse to remove staff from trains as part of the Government’s wider cuts agenda’.

In fact, the noisy announcements which most irk and infuriate regular passengers are those which play on a continual loop, and not ones uttered by a real-live guard responding to a genuine problem, such as an unexpected delay.

Torture

I don’t wish to exaggerate, but the constant repetition of noisy instructions could, were it to be conducted in a penal environment, be construed as a form of torture. 

That, for example, is what the Chinese government does to Uighurs in their ‘re-education’ camps.

After you have heard the same meaningless phrase ‘See it, say it, sorted’ blare out for the millionth time, it is hard not to scream ‘Shut it’. But in train announcement world, no one can hear you scream and resistance is useless.

Shapps’s welcome intervention does not require primary legislation. This is in contrast to the Government’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which has just suffered a series of defeats in the House of Lords.

The Bill, the joint effort of the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, and the Justice Secretary, Dominic Raab, is designed to give greater protection against ‘serious unease, alarm or distress’ caused to the public by demonstrations.

The measures are chiefly a response to the escapades of Extinction Rebellion.

The police have persuaded ministers that the existing legal framework, at least as interpreted by the courts, has obstructed their efforts to protect the public against various stunts, which have involved not just potentially lethal sit-downs on motorways, but also the physical obstruction of the distribution of newspapers whose political line the demonstrators dislike.

One of the proposals, which was defeated by a majority of 67 in the Lords (where, unlike the Commons, there is no built-in majority for the elected government), specifically related to extreme noise.

This should not require much elaboration: the colossal din caused by some demonstrations can indeed cause great unease, and even distress, to the public.

People on the autistic spectrum are especially distressed by loud noise, when endlessly repeated. But they are not the only ones affected.

As the Home Office pointed out, under the proposed new law, the police would need to take account of the particular circumstances when deciding if the threshold of ‘serious unease’ was breached: ‘A noisy protest in a town centre may not meet the threshold, but a protest creating the same amount of noise outside a school might, given the age of those likely to be impacted.

‘A noisy protest that only lasts a short amount of time may not meet the threshold, but a protest creating the same amount of noise over several days, might.’

This involves a high degree of discretionary judgment by the police: it is not just a matter of taking a decibel reading.

But I suspect it passes the ‘man on the Clapham Omnibus test’ — that is, the ordinary citizen has a pretty good idea of when and where the noise that people are making constitutes a public nuisance.

Political

There is a different way the Government could have approached this. Under the Noise Abatement Act — which came on to the statute book in 1960, largely as a result of lobbying by the founder of the Noise Abatement Society, John Connell — Parliament introduced limitations on the use of loudspeakers.

With certain exemptions, such as for the emergency services, their use was absolutely banned ‘between the hours of nine in the evening and eight the following morning’, and ‘at any other time for the purpose of advertising any entertainment, trade or business’.

So, for example, street hawkers (admittedly rather more common then than now) could no longer use megaphones to persuade the public of the merits of their products.

But if tradesmen are not allowed to use mechanical means of amplifying their message on the streets, why should the same provision not apply to those people whose pitch is political rather than commercial?

So, rather than introduce entirely new legislation to address this problem, perhaps the Government should draw up an appropriate amendment to the old Noise Abatement Act.

The point is, with a megaphone, any small group of demonstrators can be intensely disruptive — and in a way which is genuinely unpleasant.

A few weeks ago I was at my local market, and the experience was ruined by a couple of anti-vaxxers using a loudspeaker to tell us all that the Government was engaging in ‘genocide’ with the coronavirus jabs.

My sympathy was most of all with the clearly infuriated traders, having to put up with this for hours — and who, of course, would be breaking the law if they used a megaphone to make an innocuous suggestion about the merits of their fruit and vegetables.

And although some peers asserted that the Government’s own ‘anti-public nuisance’ measures were, to quote one critic, ‘reminiscent of an authoritarian government in China or Saudi Arabia’, it is not as if extreme noise ever persuaded anyone of the wrongness of a particular government, or of its laws.

In fact, the most influential demonstrations have tended to be silent ones: for example, the ‘taking the knee’, pioneered by the American footballer Colin Kaepernick, which was emulated by many others, including in this country.

And Gandhi’s Salt March, which had such a significant impact in India when under British rule, was all the more powerful for its peacefulness.

Blight

In opposing the current Government’s measure, the Labour MP Harriet Harman declared that ‘noisy protests are the exercise of the lungs of a healthy democracy’.

But there is nothing healthy about extreme noise — at least, not in the medical sense. We know that insistent noise is intensely stressful, and even apparently small increments can have a marked effect on our mental state.

For example, in 2011, scientists studying people living near seven European airports found a ten decibel increase in aircraft noise was associated with a 28 per cent increase in anxiety medication use.

At the domestic level, even if we are not under airline flight paths, there are few things that blight our lives more than having noisy neighbours. We would do almost anything to escape that.

Only last week, a dispute between neighbours over the noise of a flushing loo in an apartment block in Italy, which had been bogged down in the legal system for almost 20 years, was finally resolved.

Italy’s Supreme Court, no less, adjudicated in favour of a couple who had argued that the night-time flushing of a lavatory installed by their neighbours (four brothers), attached to a wall abutting their bedroom, had ‘infringed on their right to a good night’s sleep’.

The court ordered the brothers to pay their neighbours 500 euros compensation for every year since the complaint was first made in 2003 — a total of 9,500 euros.

There is a comical element to this story, but it is also serious: the misery caused by noise we cannot control is almost unbearable.

When, in the case of Tannoy spam on the railways, it is inflicted by public authorities, we are justified in expecting the Government to do what they can to stop it.

So what if the Transport Secretary is being accused of political meddling in matters best left to the railway bosses? Grant Shapps is doing exactly what a minister should.