FOI_25-212 Noise complaints and disciplinary action
Date of response: 06 August 2025
We have now considered your request of 10 July 2025 for the following information:
The purpose of this request is to gather information about noise complaints in university accommodation between the years 2020-2025.
Specifically, I am seeking anonymised data for each of the following calendar years: 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and partial data for 2025 if available.
Question 1. The total number of noise complaints or reports filed—either by members of the public, faculty or other students—relating to student accommodation (including private student rental properties if held)
Question 2. The number of noise complaints which led to disciplinary action against students at the university
If you only hold data for university-owned or managed properties, please prioritise this information and do not include private properties.
Our response:
We regret that on this occasion it is not possible to provide the requested information.
Under Section 1 of the Freedom of Information Act, we can confirm that the University does hold the information requested, however on this occasion it is not possible for us to provide any of the information relating to the number of noise complaints which led to disciplinary action against students of the University of East Anglia in 2023-24 and 2024-25.
We have determined that the cost of finding and assembling the requested information will exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ as defined by section 12 of the Act and the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004/3244.
'The ‘appropriate limit’ of £450, which equates to 18 hours’ work, as defined by the Information Commissioner’s Office, can relate to one request in its entirety or to a series of linked requests. If the University cannot locate, retrieve and extract some or all of the requested information within the 18 hours we are not obliged to retrieve any of the requested information.
Information relating to reports of noise disruption or noise complaints within University or privately rented student accommodation, is held within our Accommodation (ACCOM) department, our Student and Academic Services (SAS) department and our Access and Security department (where incidents required Security intervention within campus-based accommodation). Information relating to disciplinary action taken against students is held within our Student and Academic Services (SAS) (including our Student Misconduct Investigation Team (SMIT)) and prior to 2021, held within our Learning and Teaching Services (LTS). There is no central record of where this information is held.
To explain our position, student non-academic misconduct disciplinary records are not recorded with sub-categories for the reason for the student disciplinary. They are categorised as per the General Regulation for Students for which the student has been accused of breaching or investigated for breaching. There is no General Regulation assigned specifically for noise disruption or noise complaints.
Where a student had a formal complaint made against them in relation to excessive ‘noise’, they may have received disciplinary action for breaching any number of General Regulations, there is no way of knowing which cases specifically were in connection to noise complaints.
For the period outlined in your request we have identified over 900 non-academic misconduct disciplinary cases against students, which may fall into the scope of your request. The only way of identifying, extracting and recording the exact information you seek would be to interrogate each individual disciplinary case record manually to ascertain if any student faced disciplinary action specifically in relation to a noise complaint.
We have calculated it would take 5 minutes per record, or 75 hours, to locate and manually interrogate each individual disciplinary case record. Which exceeds the appropriate time-limit as outlined above.
Under section 16 of the Act, and to assist you in formulating a request to which we can respond, we can provide to you the total number of reports of ‘noise disturbance’ or complaints of noise made to our Access and Security, our Student and Academic Services and our Accommodation departments, per year of your request.
We would also be able to provide to you the number of students investigated formally and disciplined in relation to noise complaints for records held only by our Student and Academic Services department for years 2023 and 2024, not including all non-academic disciplinary cases held by LTS.
Please note we have not considered whether any exemptions may apply to such a request.
We should also point out that any revised request you submit will be treated as a new FOI request, and the 20 working-day time-limit will begin again.
We are sorry we cannot provide the data you requested, but trust this response explains our position.