Noise from burglar alarms and car alarms

House alarms and car alarms should cut out within 20 minutes and not start again unless there is a fault.

If an alarm doesn't stop

1. You should report sounding alarms to the police. Maybe the alarm is working and an intruder has accessed the property or vehicle.
2. Where possible, contact the owner or landlord of the property to notify them of the problem.
3. You could also ask keyholders to gain access to the property and deactivate the alarm.
4. For council premises, call us on 020 8314 6000. We have details of keyholders.

Housing associations' out-of-hours service

Some housing associations have an out-of-hours service for tenants experiencing antisocial behaviour and noise.

If you are a housing association tenant you can contact your landlord. They should address complaints about antisocial behaviour and noise in their properties.

Contact your housing association to see if they operate an out-of-hours service.

Contacting us about burglar alarms and car alarms

We do not provide an out-of-hours noise response service.

If you cannot contact the property owner or keyholder of the property or vehicle, report the alarm online.

We will respond during office hours (Monday–Friday, 9am–5pm). We may be able to use powers of entry to access properties and deactivate sounding alarms.

We will charge the property owner £500 to cover our costs.

Keyholder scheme for alarmed properties

We are collecting contact details of keyholders for alarm systems for properties in the borough. This means we should be able to contact keyholders if an alarm goes off when they're not there.

We will make every effort to contact a keyholder. But we also have powers to enter premises and disable alarms. If we have to do this, we will charge £500 for our time and any costs of calling out an emergency service.

Send us details of keyholders for your house or commercial property

To prevent high call-out costs, we recommend that you give us the keyholder's contact details. Then we can contact them directly if your alarm has a fault.

Please email CER@lewisham.gov.uk with details of your property and contact details of all keyholders.