Life in the loud lane

• Local authorities have the power to vary abatement notices issued under Part III of the Environmental Protection Act 1990.

John Stuart Mill in his 1859 essay On Liberty asserted that: ‘The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.’ ‘Nuisance’ is an ancient word (going back to the early 12th century and coming to us via Old French, ultimately from the Latin nocere, to harm or hurt), meaning injury, hurt, harm or something legally harmful or offensive. As was apparent from the Supreme Court judgment of 1 February 2023 in Fearn and others v Board of Trustees of the Tate Gallery [2023] UKSC 4, [2023] All ER (D) 02 (Feb) (see ‘Tate-à-Tête (Pt 3)’, NLJ, 17 March 2023, pp11-12), private nuisance refers to such actionable use of land as interferes with the claimant’s enjoyment of rights in land, such as to cause diminution in the utility