Water Supply in Kent

Katie Lam Excerpts

Wednesday 10th June 2026 Westminster Hall

[Katie Lam (Weald of Kent) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak with you in the Chair, Mr Twigg. I thank the hon. Member for Ashford (Sojan Joseph) for securing the debate.

For people in the Weald of Kent, problems with the water supply have become depressingly common. The most recent outages, last month, left thousands of people without water or experiencing severely low pressure during a heatwave. South East Water, which covers the Weald of Kent, said that it had planned for the heatwave, but thousands of people across the Weald were still once again left without running water, unable to wash, cook, or run their businesses or farms. That followed a larger outage earlier this year, which left tens of thousands of people across Kent and Sussex without running water for days. That time, South East Water blamed a freeze and thaw event and the impact of Storm Goretti.

Come rain or shine, there are clearly serious problems at South East Water. On both occasions, but especially in January, communication was poor or non-existent. South East Water was unable to answer even basic questions, such as, “If I send my constituents to this bottled water station, will there be any bottled water for them when they get there?” The company took days to respond to emails to its supposedly instantaneous email address. It simply had no idea what was going on. For far too many people, this intermittent service and poor communication are part and parcel of life in the Weald of Kent.

Earlier this year, I ran a water survey to ask people about their historical experiences with South East Water. Nearly 3,000 households responded, and it was immediately clear that the catastrophic handling of January’s outage was not a lapse in form. The company has been providing a terrible service for years, and people are absolutely right to be fed up with it. One disabled resident reported that, despite being on South East Water’s priority list for receiving bottled water during times of crisis, they received no water at all for the duration of the outage. Farmers, who simply cannot afford to have water shut off for days on end, reported that farms and livestock did not even seem to be a consideration. One local farmer reported that, despite many hours on the phone, South East Water were

“totally unhelpful and rude, suggesting [that] I go and pick up a pack of water”.

To put that into context, this farmer pays for 250 litres of water a day. The company told him to go and pick up a pack of water.

The sheer volume of the individual stories was horrific—one woman who had just given birth to children had to take her toddler in the back of the car to the bottled water stations, because she was on the vulnerable list, but deliveries had not been made. Of those who responded to the survey, four in every five said they had been left without running water over the past decade, and four in 10 said that they had been without running water four or more times over that same period. That is absurd in 21st-century Britain.

Those self-reported experiences have been mirrored in recent months by a number of official inquiries into South East Water’s performance, both historically and in relation to the January outages. Ofwat has recently proposed a £22 million fine following supply failures between 2020 and 2023, noting that South East Water “has not taken ownership” of the underlying issues that caused the outages. Given the recent outages, it is clear that it still has not learned a thing.

The report produced by the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee was perhaps the most damning. It described the company as “devoid of proper leadership” and as “an unaccountable clique.” I thank the members of the Committee for their work in scrutinising South East Water’s leadership, particularly my hon. Friends the Members for South Northamptonshire (Sarah Bool) and for Bridlington and The Wolds (Charlie Dewhirst).

In the light of those reports, both the chairman of South East Water, Chris Train, and the CEO, David Hinton, have resigned. That was a long time coming. Given their handling of the outages in January and the way they responded to the subsequent investigations, it was clear that change at South East Water was impossible under their leadership. They had shown no understanding of why they had failed, and no appreciation whatsoever of the harm they had caused to the people who rely on their service.

Although the resignations are very much welcome, the problems at South East Water did not start with Mr Hinton’s appointment as chief executive and will not automatically end with his resignation. As the results of the survey demonstrate, the issues at South East Water are endemic. I hope the company will use the change of leadership as an opportunity for true transformation and to review how it operates, plans and communicates with the public.

I want to use this opportunity to urge the regulator and the Minister, who I know is very focused on this issue, to do everything they can to encourage the company to go through a proper period of transformation. In this place and elsewhere, we will continue to hold it to account. However, it is important that South East Water is not just punished retrospectively, or after the fact, for its failures. Instead, we must ensure that it is taking the right steps to stop this problem becoming a permanent feature of life in the Weald of Kent.