Strong cooking smells waft into our house from next door if we leave the window open. What are our rights? DEAN DUNHAM replies

The outlet is close to our property and if our back door or windows are open, the cooking smells spread into the house. It is also unpleasant to sit in the garden. 

The neighbour tried to redirect the air with a pipe, but it still smells. What is the legal position?

Name and address supplied

Dean Dunham replies: Persistent cooking odours forced into your home and garden are not something you have to endure. The law recognises this as a genuine grievance.

The key legal concept here is private nuisance – where someone’s use of their property causes an unreasonable and substantial interference with your own home enjoyment. 

Strong cooking smells that regularly fill your house when a door or window is open, and that make sitting in your garden unpleasant, can fall within this.

A reader wants to know if they can legally do anything about the cooking smells coming out of their neighbour's kitchen

The courts have long accepted that noxious or persistent smells can amount to an actionable nuisance.

That said, I must be balanced. Not every cooking smell qualifies. The law expects a degree of give-and-take between neighbours, and the occasional waft of dinner is part of normal life.

The question is one of degree: how strong, how frequent, how prolonged and how much it genuinely interferes with your everyday living. Given your account of regular, strong intrusion affecting both house and garden, there could be a credible case.

Encouragingly, there’s also a statutory route that costs you nothing. Under the Environmental Protection Act 1990, odours can, in certain circumstances, amount to a statutory nuisance, so your first and best step is to contact your council’s environmental health department.

Officers can investigate and serve an abatement notice requiring your neighbour to resolve it, for instance by repositioning or upgrading the extractor outlet. Ignoring such a notice is a criminal offence.

Before you take any steps, try to resolve the issue directly with your neighbour. There are encouraging signs as they have attempted a fix, which shows goodwill.

Tell them, politely, that it hasn’t worked and ask them to try repositioning the outlet or fitting a carbon filter. Keep a diary of dates and times. If informal efforts fail, environmental health is your route.  

Garage door I bought a week ago won't open but the  firm I bought it from won't answer the phone 

I bought a garage roller door a year ago with a five-year warranty. For the past three weeks, it has been broken and I can’t get into my garage. 

The firm I got it from doesn’t pick up the phone, return calls or answer WhatsApp messages. 

Is there a reasonable time I should wait for a repair before asking for a refund?

P.M., Hampshire

Dean Dunham replies: You have solid rights and practical protection. First, that warranty is not your only safeguard and often not even your best one.

Aside from the guarantee, the Consumer Rights Act 2015 gives you protections that can’t be sidestepped – goods must be of satisfactory quality and durable.

A roller door failing after one year falls well short of what you’re reasonably entitled to expect, so you have a clear claim.

Where you’re relying on a repair, the law requires it to be carried out ‘within a reasonable time and without significant inconvenience’. 

Three weeks with no access to your garage, and a company refusing to even answer the phone, has comfortably exceeded what’s reasonable.

Being locked out of your garage is precisely the kind of ‘significant inconvenience’ the act has in mind. 

If a repair isn’t done within that reasonable time, you become entitled to move on to the next remedy – a replacement or a price reduction, and potentially to reject the goods.

Here’s what to do. Stop chasing by phone and WhatsApp, which leave you with little proof. 

Write formally, by email and by post, citing the Consumer Rights Act 2015, setting out the fault, the three-week delay, and giving a firm final deadline (say 14 days) to repair or replace before you claim a refund.

Check how you paid. If you used a credit card, Section 75 may make the card provider jointly liable. 

A debit card offers a similar remedy called chargeback, but you must have paid within the past 120 days. Both are valuable fallbacks.

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