The Rt Hon Mr Alistair Carmichael MP, Chair of the House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee has written to David Hinton CEO of South East Water to raise his “significant concern” over the ongoing lack of water access for 24,000 customers in and around Tunbridge Wells.

The letter was also copied to the Minister for Water and Flooding.

Yesterday South East Water issued a boil water notice in Tunbridge Wells as water supply was restored for flushing toilets and washing only. The area entered its fifth day without water supplies, with several schools closed, and medical facilities and care homes left without a secure supply.

Pointing out that businesses have also had to close and many, including restaurants and hotels, have lost thousands of pounds worth of business, the EFRA Chair writes:’

“The lack of water supply has reportedly been caused by a bad batch of chemicals at the Pembury Water Treatment Works, a site that has previously been identified as at significant risk of causing such an incident. This suggests a concerning lack of resilience in South East Water’s (SEW) supply infrastructure.”

The letter raises a number of serious issues, including:

• The situation appears to have been aggravated by a substandard crisis management plan - SEW’s approach to the selection of sites for bottled water distribution and ensuring that enough bottled water is supplied to those sites has also been criticised by local representatives and consumers.
• Delays in deliveries to vulnerable people and reports that care homes and other medical settings have not been supplied with bottled water as promised.
• Concerns about the adequacy of SEW’s crisis communications - several commitments to restore supplies have been made and then ultimately missed.

The MP goes on to raise further concerns about the situation in light of the Committee’s long-term inquiry into the water sector, expressing particular concern to see that “lessons have not been learned from recent large-scale outages.”

He also flags up the fact that over the past five years Ofwat has consistently criticised South East Water’s performance on water outages - in 2023 Ofwat launched a statutory inquiry into the firm’s failings in this area.

At the time, Ofwat said SEW was consistently failing its customers and an accompanying report identified problems with communication and the distribution of bottled water during crises.

In July, this year 3,000 households in Kent were also left without water for six days.

“The recurrence of these issues raises questions about the approach that SEW’s management has taken to the regulator’s previous findings and the importance that it places on addressing them; indeed, SEW has recently been publicly critical of Ofwat’s concerns,” the letter says.

It also refers to the fact just a week before the most recent outage, a SEW spokesperson had assured local councillors that resilience and capacity had been improved, and a plan was in place for supply interruptions, commenting:

“It has since transpired that capacity and planning was not sufficient.”

Writing to David Hinton yesterday, the MP has asked the water company CEO to provide the following information within one week of supply being fully restored:

• Full details and documentation relating to SEW’s overall crisis management plan for water outages.
• Any risk assessments or registers relating to the Pembury Plant and wider area affected.
• All details relating to local measures in place for the areas affected by recent outages, including the planned locations of water distribution centres and the measures in place to secure access to water supplies.
• An initial assessment of the causes of the recent outages and the immediate measures being put in place to avoid a repeat in the near term.
• The steps you are taking to compensate individuals and businesses in the affected areas.
• The basis on which commitments were made on the time of restoration of supplies in this instance, and the reasons why those commitments were not met.

The EFRA Committee Chair concludes by saying:

"My Committee will assess this documentation before considering its next steps relating to this matter."