South East Water: Disruption of Supply

Clive Lewis Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Emma Hardy]

On resilience, one of the things that we want to introduce for the first time is asset standards for water company assets. At the moment, those do not exist; there is no rule or criterion for the standard to which water companies need to maintain their water treatment work, waste water treatment work or pipes, or for how much leakage is acceptable. With the new regulator, we want to introduce those asset standards, which say that companies have to maintain their assets to a certain standard. That should help change things and basically build against what we have seen—admittedly not on this occasion; on this occasion, the company ran out of water—in other cases where infrastructure falls over because it is not adequately maintained and looked after.

That is why the no-notice inspections matter; with those MOT-style inspections, as I refer to them, people from the Environment Agency can go in with no notice, check the assets, mark the water company on them and then give it an enforcement notice to say that it has to improve its assets up to a certain standard. The situation will not be fixed overnight, but having that goal for where we need to get to will help to prevent infrastructure from falling over because it is not properly looked after.

[Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)]

South East Water is one of a number of privatised water companies that are responsible for selling off 35 reservoirs since 2017, and those companies have not built a single one since privatisation that is complete. We understand that this Government are committed to a regulatory approach to dealing with this issue, but that is akin to putting a complaints box on the Titanic. It is a nice idea, but I do not think it will work. Ultimately, private water companies’ first priority is private shareholders—many of them overseas—who do not give a damn about our constituents. This situation will keep happening until water is put back under public control, in public hands, and owned by the public.

[Emma Hardy]

I know how passionately my hon. Friend cares about this issue, and I genuinely pay tribute to him for championing this issue and for the work he has done in Parliament to bring people together. As I have mentioned, the White Paper talks about setting up a transparent process to look at whether a company should transition to a different model, including a not-for-profit, if that was what it wished to do.