SIR: Since writing to you about noisy neighbours - not my own I hasten to say - I have had phone calls from others with this problem.

Recently, I had a letter from a lady who has suffered these people for over two years.

After several unanswered letters and numerous phone calls to the council, she says, two officials came to investigate. She was told: "The tenants deny any wrong doing - and, it isn't council policy to move tenants with considerable rent arrears." She was even told, off the record, to retaliate by playing loud music.

She then wrote to the Local Ombudsman, in York, who handed the matter back to the council, she says. And that, apart from an off-the-record phone call from the council, in which she was told off, was the end of story. The powers-that-be seem to think because these things happen on council estates, it doesn't really matter. In fact, it seems, they are expected to happen.

There was a recent case in Birmingham where a man killed himself because he was the victim of pest neighbours, and, here in town, the case where a pensioner stabbed his noisy neighbour. Surely tragedies of this magnitude are enough to wake someone up to a very apparent problem.

?Brian Derbyshire

Ribchester Grove, Bolton

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.