Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what progress his Department has made with the BSI to develop a standard for the calculation of road and railway noise.

The BSi Committee for Transportation Noise, which meets approximately every six months, has been working on developing a standard for the calculation of road and rail noise since 2017.

To achieve this aim, the committee set up a scoping panel which reported to the committee throughout the period 2017-2020. This was followed by a joint workshop with the Institute of Acoustics (IOA). Members of the scoping panel ran a dedicated session at the annual IOA conference in October 2020 and outputs were reported in an IOA Acoustics publication.

Defra is a member of both the BSi Committee for Transportation Noise and the scoping panel and continues to work collaboratively with other members as the Standard moves towards drafting stage.