The Chief Executive and Chair of South East Water (SEW), together with the chiefs of Ofwat, the Drinking Water Inspectorate and the Consumer Council for Water, will appear before the House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affais (EFRA) Committee for further questioning next week on 14th April as part of its Reforming the water sector inquiry.
The EFRA Committee will question the Chief Executive and Chair of South East Water (SEW), alongside a non-executive Director of the company who has led its investigation into a two-week drinking water outage that affected the Tunbridge Wells area last year.
In the same session, the Committee will later question chiefs of Ofwat, the Drinking Water Inspectorate and the Consumer Council for Water.
The session follows a previous hearing on 6 January, during which SEW’s leadership was accused of giving incomplete and inaccurate evidence to the Committee about the Tunbridge Wells outage in November and December 2025, which left thousands of residents and businesses without clean drinking water.
Following the completion of investigations by SEW and the Drinking Water Inspectorate, the cross-party Committee will examine the extent to which SEW was at fault for the outage, which stemmed from an incident at the company’s Pembury Treatment Works.
There will also be questions about SEW’s handling of previous and subsequent outages, including infrastructure failures that impacted large areas of Kent and Sussex this year. MPs will also consider how the company engages with Ofwat and the Drinking Water Inspectorate, and how it has taken forward previous recommendations on how to improve.
Ofwat has previously stated that SEW fails to conduct proper “root cause analysis” after incidents that should prompt improvements, and that it should not use climate change related factors as a sufficient explanation.
Last month the regulator issued SEW with a £22 million fine for failures between 2020 and 2023 and launched a fresh investigation in January.
In the second panel,witnesses will be asked to reflect on what the incidents involving SEW mean in terms of reforms to the water sector.
Witnesses appearing before the Committee from 09.30 am onwards on Tuesday 14 April in Committee room 6, Palace of Westminster are as follows:
From 09.30:
- David Hinton, Chief Executive at South East Water
- Chris Train OBE, Chair at South East Water
- Caroline Sheridan, Non-Executive Director at South East Water
From 10.45:
- Markus Rink, Chief Inspector at Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI)
- Chris Walters, CEO at Ofwat
- Dr Mike Keil, CEO at Consumer Council for Water
Previous evidence session saw SEW CEO and DWI give conflicting accounts
The Committee’s previous evidence session on 6 January saw David Hinton and the Drinking Water Inspectorate give conflicting accounts of whether the November-to-December incident at Pembury Treatment Works was foreseeable and could have been avoided.
Mr Hinton told the Committee that a coagulant chemical, which the company relied on at Pembury to purify drinking water, became ineffective. The company hypothesised that this was because water levels in a reservoir had fallen during a drought earlier in the year, causing the chemistry of the water supply to change. A new type of coagulant had to be sourced before service could be restored, Mr Hinton said.
Appearing immediately after Mr Hinton, DWI Chief Inspector Marcus Rink contradicted this explanation. He said the incident should “not have been a surprise” and was instead due to factors that Mr Hinton had not explained. These included:
- poor filter performance and reduced backwash capacity
- reliance on manual interventions
- a “lack of online performance visibility meaning that they were ‘flying blind’ and unable to intervene with coagulant dose”
He added that had SEW carried out a recent "jar test", a means of testing coagulant efficacy, the original coagulant would have worked.
In subsequent correspondence with the Committee, the Chair of SEW, Chris Train, said Pembury had experienced a “very complex combination” of circumstances with “limited precedent”, and so the event was therefore “not foreseeable”.
The Committee has received in confidence the DWI’s report into the Pembury Treatment Works incident and a preliminary report by South East Water. Both organisations will publish their own reports in due course.
Click here to watch the evidence session live on Parliamentlive.tv or to catch up later
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