What challenges is South East Water facing after Tunbridge Wells crisis?

South East Water executives were no doubt hopeful they could get to the end of this year without any further problems.

Parts of its East Sussex region are still officially in drought and it is the only water company in the country where customers are still facing a hosepipe ban, after Yorkshire Water lifted restrictions on Wednesday.

But as the countdown to Christmas kicked off in the Kent town of Tunbridge Wells, festive lights twinkled, markets opened, and the water went off.

For two weeks, 24,000 homes and businesses were without drinking water.

In what has been described as chaos, schools were closed, while cafes and restaurants said they had lost thousands of pounds in business.

Meanwhile, queues for bottled water stations clogged up parts of the town.

Last week supply returned but with a warning – the tap water was not safe to drink and must be boiled before it could be consumed.

The supply issue was over, but customers faced new problems.

There was confusion around which homes and business were under the "boil notice", a lack of clarity about what the tap water could and could not be used for and anxiety from many over the quality of the water.

Now, 14 days after the taps first ran dry, the boil notice has been lifted.

The crisis has ended but the calls for SEW's chief executive David Hinton to resign remain.

We asked SEW's director of water supply, Douglas Whitfield, whether his boss was considering resigning.

Mr Whitfield called the question "unhelpful", saying it "fundamentally misunderstands" the challenges the firm had been facing, not only recently but "as a company over the last few years and as an industry".

So, what are those challenges and is the water company doing enough to meet them?

When Tunbridge Wells MP Mike Martin called on Mr Hinton to resign, he said the outage was "the latest incident is in a long line of problems for which the company is responsible".

Since Mr Hinton took the top job nearly five years ago, the performance of the company has deteriorated in key areas, according to Ofwat's latest report.

Mr Hinton has now been called to appear before MPs in the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs committee.

The water regulator Ofwat said SEW had seen an increase in leakages over the 2020-25 period and the company had been in the bottom three companies for the last five years when it came to water supply interruptions.

In July, 3,000 properties around Herne Bay lost supply, some for six days. SEW said the heatwave was to blame.

In March, a burst pipe flooded a treatment station in west Kent, which affected 7,000 customers in the Swanton Valley and West Peckham area. Some people were cut off for five days.

In December 2023, homes in Brightling and Robertsbridge were without water for three days after a burst pipe.

In June 2023, thousands of SEW customers in Crowborough, Wadhurst, Biddenden and Staplehurst were cut off, some for a week, because of high water demands over the summer.

In December 2022, 15,000 SEW homes and business across Kent and Sussex were affected by disruption to supplies caused by a burst pipe.

In February 2022, Storm Eunice caused widespread disruption to water supply. The company estimates that about 85,000 consumers may have been affected.

The impact lasted for 10 days between 18 and 28 February 2022.

Ofwat is currently carrying out an enforcement investigation into SEW's supply resilience. The watchdog has not said when that review will be published.

The water firm said it was learning lessons from the past and was investing in infrastructure.

In response to the June 2023 outages in the Crowborough and Wadhurst areas, SEW invested more than £12m in a new pipeline taking water from Bewl reservoir to Wadhurst and Rotherfield storage tanks.

Large investment projects also include the Broad Oak reservoir, near Canterbury. If it gets the go ahead, it will be the first reservoir built in the South East for more than 40 years.

A new multi-million-pound water treatment works in Maidstone is due to come on line next year.

The company says it has recently improved connections at the Pembury Water Treatment Works, but as that works is under a Drinking Water Inspectorate improvement notice and is the source of the recent supply problems which caused issues for thousands in the Tunbridge Wells area, many customers may argue improvement works did not go far enough.

There are still big questions as to how quickly lessons are being learnt.

When we put it to Mr Whitfield that the company's failure to meet challenges suggested a "problem at the top", he pointed to a review into the water sector which was published in July this year.

Mr Whitfield said the challenges the industry was facing were "far wider than an individual company and individual people".

In July, Sir Jon Cunliffe, who carried out the Independent Water Commission review, said "the underlying fact is we have not managed this well, and no one comes out of this with very much glory - not government, not the water companies and not the regulators".

The review issued 88 recommendations for the sector.

But for the tens of thousands of SEW's customers who were without water for significant periods of times over the past few years, there is little comfort in knowing that the whole system is failing.

And in the inglorious list of failing water companies, there are no accolades for SEW which, over the past five years, when it comes to supplying drinking water, is failing more than the others.

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