I have suffered noisy neighbour trouble and tried all the advised routes i.e. contacting the local council and/or landlord (in my case, Metropolitan Thames Valley Housing). All these supposed correct channels for resolving such problems were useless. MTVH doesn't care about ANYTHING its tenants do unless it threatens their rent. I once wrote to it a Freedom of Information request to see how many tenants it had evicted for antisocial behaviour compared to tenants it had evicted for non-payment of rent (I expected the answer to be 'never' for ASB and 'every time within a few months' for non-payment of rent). It refused to comply with my FOI request.
Your Local Environmental Health MAY be helpful but again, in my experience, they are utter shite (and especially so if the accused person is in any way intimidating as 9 times out of 10, the officers are women who are afraid to get tough on such a person). The law on the matter is that they can ONLY serve a noise abatement order IF they determine if the noise is "of a statutory level" which means that the noise has to be loud enough, and persistent enough to constitute an annoyance TO THEM - not you i.e. they consider themselves the experts in what is normal day-to-day noises and levels of noise, not you. This is, in my opinion, a gigantic flaw in the system as it's very easy for them to listen to a few recordings and dismiss them as 'not all that bad' because they don't have to live with it.
Moreover, any ill-health you may have that is worsened by the noise, or that makes the noises seem worse, will not be taken into consideration because, so the officers insist, this is how their rules work i.e. they 'must' judge the noise nuisance from the perspective of a 'normal person' NOT an ill person. In my case, I was getting to the point of wanting to kill either the neighbour or myself but this just meant that I was 'over-sensitive' and not being reasonable.
The EH officers will instal some recording equipment and get you to record 10 second examples of the nuisance noise over a week (the equipment has a buffer that enables it to capture any noise as long as you press the record button within 10 seconds of some noise disturbance happening). In my case, the recordings I made, which I was certain would seal the guy's fate, turned out not to have worked in some way. I had to try again three times i.e. go through another 3 weeks of recording, before they finally decided that what I was hearing was not a statutory offence. I believed that their equipment was faulty and/or they didn't know how to use it properly. I recall one time when, during setting it up, one of them said to the other, "What's that red light for?" The other one replied, "I don't know." and then, "Oh, it's gone off now." while I was watching.
In the end, furious, I telephoned the office of Environmental Health and complained and I was advised that I would be more likely to get satisfaction if I took private legal action because then, the judges are allowed to take ill-health into consideration and have much more latitude in making their judgement. Of course, this is the expensive route that one shouldn't have to take.
I couldn't afford a solicitor but the problem was serious enough that I prosecuted the man myself. To do this, just ask the customer services people at the court to explain to you how to do it. It is cheap and, while quite a bit of a drag in an administerial sense e.g. things have to be done in triplicate for the court, it's better (and cheaper) than moving home because of some antisocial assholes - or committing murder or suicide from being driven out of your mind.
My neighbour moved out 4 days before the trial. It is particularly pleasurable posting the notice of prosecution papers through the letter box of the noisy neighbour/s. NB. You will have to get your own evidence and you will have to provide copies of this evidence to the accused (this is a requirement of the legal process). It is especially good if the evidence you get is embarrassing to the neighbour in some way. In my case, I recorded my neighbour making disparaging sexual comments about women which showed him up as the utter dickwad he was. I knew he wouldn't want to have to attempt to defend himself about those comments in front of a judge.