New powers that allow council officers to silence irritating burglar alarms could be adopted in West Oxfordshire.

Under the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005, which is about to come into force, authorised environmental health officers are able to enter the grounds of a building and silence an alarm if it is considered to be causing annoyance.

A warrant must be obtained if it is necessary to enter the building, but officers can, with the help of an alarm engineer, silence exterior alarms with no notice to the occupants. The council currently has to serve notice before it can deal with such issues.

Martin Rowland, the council's head of environmental health, said nuisance noise was not a major issue in the district last year officers dealt with just six incidents but the new powers would make the response time faster.

He said: "At the moment, it takes a little bit longer as we have to serve a notice on the person and then step in, whereas the new powers mean if we judged the noise to be annoying, we could just silence the alarm there and then.

"If we had to break into a house, we would need a warrant, but in a number of cases, it's possible to silence an alarm just by putting a ladder up to the house and turning it off at the box."

Officers are able to take action only if the noise has been sounding continuously for more than 20 minutes or intermittently for more than one hour and is likely to give people nearby reasonable cause for annoyance.

West Oxfordshire District Council is set to decide whether to give officers the powers at its cabinet meeting tonight, Mr Rowland said they would have to use their judgement about whether a noise was causing annoyance, but that just one complaint would be enough.