How long does it take A2Dominion to contact me?
When you report ASB, we’ll contact you within 2 working days. If you report over the weekend or a bank holiday it may take us slightly longer, so please bear with us.
We do our best to sort out issues within 90 days and will update you every 2 weeks on what’s happening with your case.
What is the process?
The process depends on the type of complaint but usually there are 4 levels or stages:
- Risk assessment
- Investigation
- Intervention (non-legal)
- Tenancy enforcement (legal action)
- Possession proceedings
1. Risk assessment
At the risk assessment stage, we assess how severe the ASB is and what the risk is to you. If we feel your complaint is a less severe ASB issue, we’ll give you advice on what you can do. Examples of low risk ASB include car parking conflicts or low-level noise such as a baby crying.
If we feel that your case is high risk, then we’ll assign you a case worker to investigate the issue. Examples of high risk ASB include aggressive or criminal behaviour.
2. Investigation
The investigation stage is all about fact-finding. During this time our case worker will:
- Contact you and agree an action plan. This includes actions for you and for your case worker.
- Contact the person you’ve made a complaint about to discuss the report that has been made about them and get their version of events.
- Contact any other residents or witnesses to get further information.
- Contact any other relevant agencies that may provide further information (such as police and environment health teams).
- The case worker may ask you to use the good neighbourhood card first and if that doesn’t work to use The Noise App to gather evidence in noise cases. We may also ask you to keep an incident diary to record the ASB.
If we don’t have enough evidence, we’ll let you know, and we’ll have to close the case. If we have sufficient evidence then we’ll move onto the intervention stage.
3. Intervention
During the intervention stage we’ll work with your and the person causing the problem. Our case worker may use any one or more of the actions below:
- Refer the case to multi-agency forums – meetings held by different agencies such as the police, local council, mental health teams and housing (e.g. ASB forum)
- Visit you and the person causing the problem with or without partner agencies
- Send warning letters to the person causing the problem
- Offer mediation services, to help you and the person causing the problem to work it out between you
- Offer an acceptable behaviour contract to the person causing the problem – a list of reasonable requests about their behaviour for them to agree to
- Make referrals to support services such as mental health teams and drug and alcohol support if necessary.
If the ASB stops then we will close the case. If it continues then we may move on to tenancy enforcement actions.
4. Tenancy enforcement
Tenancy enforcement actions may include:
- A notice seeking possession or section 21 notice – this is the first step towards eviction
- Injunction or undertaking to the court – this is used to stop the particular behaviour that has been reported.
Some people stop causing ASB when legal action is taken, however if it continues then depending on how severe the case is we may consider a possession proceedings.
5. What are possession proceeding?
If you live next to a person causing ASB issues and all attempts to resolve the issue have been unsuccessful, we may consider possession proceedings to try and evict them. This is not an easy process, however, and in fact it rarely happens.
Eviction is the last option we take, and we only consider it when all the other steps have failed.
What if my neighbour is violent?
If your neighbour is committing a crime, using hate speech or has been violent, report it to the police immediately.
Further information
Find out more about ASB
Find out more about the good neighbour card
Find out more about how to report ASB