South East Water will pay £30.5m after a series of supply interruptions, customer failings and a licence breach, the regulator Ofwat has said. The redress package concludes three investigations into the supplier and includes a previously proposed £22m fine for water supply failures between 2020 and 2023 that affected more than 286,000 people.
Ofwat launched a second investigation at the start of this year after further supply interruptions in Tunbridge Wells and across Kent and Sussex between November and January, leaving up to 70,000 homes without water. A third probe followed the downgrading of South East Water’s credit rating by Moody’s in May, which breached its licence condition. Ofwat will appoint an independent monitor to review the company’s performance improvement plan.
Helen Campbell, Ofwat’s executive director for delivery, said: “South East Water must now focus on what matters most – its customers. These failures have caused real disruption and hardship for residents and businesses across many years, and supply interruptions of this scale have happened far too often.”
About half of the fine, £13m, will be ringfenced for fixing issues that caused the supply failures. Ofwat said £1.5m would go towards a community fund for affected areas in Kent and Sussex. The package also includes £5m for free water butts for households and two separate £5m payments for site storage and smart metering for non-household users such as businesses and public sector sites.
Mike Martin, MP for Tunbridge Wells—where 24,000 homes were without drinking water for two weeks last year due to failures at the Pembury water treatment centre—said South East Water needed to “stop tinkering around the edges with remedial measures and start addressing the root of the problem”. He added: “The whole fine – not just 40% of it – needs to be invested back into the network for critical infrastructure upgrades.”
The ruling is the latest in a series of investigations by Ofwat, which has resulted in fines and enforcement packages worth more than £300m. The biggest penalty was £104m for Thames Water in May last year over wastewater failures.
