Public nuisance

 ( Crimes ) 

1. Title to sue: In the case Walsh v Ervin,. as the general principle is usually stated, an individual cannot sue alone for relief in respect of a nuisance to a public highway unless he has sustained some particular damage, in the sense of some substantial injury, direct and not merely consequential, beyond that suffered by the public generally.
2. Interference is with a public right: In the case Attorney-General v PYA Quarries Ltd,. a nuisance which is so widespread in its range or so indiscriminate in its effect that it would not be reasonable to expect one person to take proceedings on his own responsibility to put a stop to it, but that it should be taken on the responsibility of the community at large
3. The interference is substantial and unreasonable: The interference must be substantial and unreasonable in order to establish public nuisance. In modern world, daily inconveniences and annoyances are part of unreasonable and substantial interference.

However, there are some examples that shows even if it could cause interference to the public, there is no public nuisance. For example, in Maitland v Raisbeck, "it would seem that every driver of a vehicle on the road would be turned into an insurer in respect of latent defects in this machines", even if a danger was created because of moral use of vehicle. Maitland v Raisbeck 1944 1 KB 689 at p. 692 Harper v Haden 1933 Ch 298. In the case Silservice Pty Ltd v Supreme Bready Pty Ltd,. Roper Chief Judge in Equity stated that:

Spencer (1989 at 59) describes the offence as "a rag-bag of odds and ends which we should nowadays call 'public welfare offences.Spencer, J. R. (1989). "Public Nuisance – A Critical Examination". Cambridge Law Journal 55. But the common feature of the crime is that members of the public suffer a common injury through interference with rights which they enjoy as citizens. The modern definition is found in paras 31–40 Archbold (2005):

In Attorney General v PYA Quarries Ltd the issue was whether quarrying activities—which showered the neighbourhood with stones and splinters, and caused dust and vibrations—were a private nuisance affecting some of the residents (which would have been civil), but not a public nuisance affecting all Her Majesty's liege subjects living in the area. In his judgment Charles Romer concluded at p 184:

Denning LJ agreed, at p. 191,

In R v Madden (1975) 1 WLR 1379 the defendant telephoned a bomb hoax to a steel works whose business was disrupted for about an hour. James LJ accepted that hoax telephone calls falsely asserting the presence of explosives could amount to an offence of public nuisance but the few employees whose day was disrupted were not a sufficiently wide class of the public. But in R v Norbury (1978) Crim LR 435 the defendant made 605 obscene telephone calls to 494 different women over a period of four years. This repetitive behaviour over a long period, intended to cause offence and alarm, was held the kind of behaviour which the public has an interest in condemning. This is not without its problems because each telephone call lacks the element of common injury. As a comparison, the cases of R v Ruffell (1991) 13 Cr App R (S) 204 and R v Shorrock (1994) QB 279 involved the prosecution of the organisers of "acid house" parties at night in fields adjacent to residential accommodation with liability confirmed because they knew, or ought to have known, that there was a real risk of creating the sort of nuisance that in fact occurred. At each party there was major traffic disruption and the noise of music, with clean-up operations required the following day. While R v Ong (2001) 1 Cr App R (S) 404 involved a betting scam in which the floodlights at a Premier Division football match between Charlton Athletic and Liverpool were to be sabotaged which was inherently dangerous to the thousands within the ground.

In R v Soul (1980) 70 Cr App R 295 a group who agreed to secure the unlawful release of a restricted Broadmoor patient was convicted of conspiracy to effect a public nuisance. The court seems to have assumed that the public would have been exposed to danger had the plan been put into effect. That the Crown had failed to prove any actual danger or common injury was not considered (see the critical commentary at (1980) Crim. LR 234 suggesting that the courts were improperly reintroducing "public mischief" into the law despite the ruling by the House of Lords in R v Withers (1975) AC 842). Similarly, in R v Millward (1986) 8 Cr. App R(S) 209 the defendant made hundreds of telephone calls (636 in a single day) to a young woman police officer with whom he had become infatuated, at the police station where she worked. As to the requirement of common injury, Glidewell LJ said:

In R v Johnson (Anthony) (1997) 1 WLR 367, the Court of Appeal confronted the problem head-on. The defendant had made hundreds of obscene telephone calls to at least thirteen women. The defence argued each telephone call was a single isolated act to an individual. Tucker J rejected the argument at pp. 370–371:

This was followed in a number of cases such as R v Holliday and Leboutillier (2004) EWCA Crim 1847 R v Holliday and Leboutillier 2004 EWCA Crim 1847 in which two animal liberation activists made a large number of telephone calls to employees and shareholders of certain companies whose activities the appellants opposed. The calls were designed to jam the company telephone switchboards, and some of them were threatening and intimidating.

The common law offence of public nuisance was abolished in England and Wales by s. 78 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. It remains an offence under the common law of Northern Ireland.2022 c. 32 s. 207(1)

The second argument raised by the defence was that the law lacked the certainty required to be valid under Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Of all the common law offences considered at Strasbourg, only the criterion of " contra bonos mores" had been held to lack the appropriate quality of certainty (see Hashman and Harrup v United Kingdom (1999) 30 EHRR 241). The Lords therefore held that, as defined in Archbold, the offence did have sufficient certainty so that any legal practitioner asked to advise on whether proposed conduct was likely to be criminal would be able to give an accurate answer.

• Disturbing the peace
• Noise pollution
• Wasting police time