South East Water’s chair, Chris Train, resigns with immediate effect.

Is that enough? – Owl

committees.parliament.uk

The EFRA Committee has today [Friday 1 May] declared it has no confidence in the Chief Executive or Board of South East Water (SEW) to address the company’s multiple and ongoing failures and protect residents from disruption, highlighted by the major recent water outage in Tunbridge Wells.

• Read the report [HTML]
• Read the report [PDF]
• Inquiry: Reforming the water sector

In a new report the cross-party Committee finds SEW’s leadership’s incompetence has accompanied a culture of unaccountability that has perpetuated the company’s poor performance. Its wholly inadequate governance framework has also failed to hold its senior employees to account.  

The report comes after two Committee hearings into the major water outage in Tunbridge Wells in late 2025, in which tens of thousands of customers, many of them in care settings or vulnerable, were left without drinking water for two weeks. The Committee recalled SEW’s leadership after concerns about the accuracy of evidence it initially gave during a Committee hearing in January. 

The report states: “South East Water presents as a company devoid of proper leadership, riddled with cultural problems that raise serious concerns about the ability of the executive team, led by the CEO David Hinton, to bring the company back into compliance and deliver the services their customers deserve. Leadership teams play a major role in how company culture develops; culture change at this scale requires South East Water’s leadership to change.” 

The Committee is also calling on shareholders in SEW – Utilities Trust of Australia, NatWest Group Pension Fund and Desjardins Group and associated holding companies – to hold the company to account. 

A summary of the report’s conclusions and a timeline of major incidents are included below. 

Chair comment

EFRA Committee Chair Alistair Carmichael [LibDem] said: 

“We have taken the unusual but necessary step of declaring no confidence in SEW’s CEO and Board because we feel obliged to highlight the gravity of this extraordinarily poor situation. This is an exceptional failure of management and of corporate governance. The refusal of anyone in the company to be accountable for this failure cannot, in our view, be overlooked. 

“One cannot overstate the dangers of so many communities losing water supply for extended periods, including schools, GP surgeries and care homes. The Committee heard that many South East Water customers have so little confidence in the security of their supply that they are stockpiling bottled water because they fear the inevitable will happen again. In twenty-first century Britain that is an almost incredible state of affairs. 

“Someone in this company needs to take a grip, be accountable for its failings and to put them right. That should be for the executive leadership of the company and, failing that, it should then be the non-executive directors. That would normally be the end of the road, but when that fails, shareholders have a duty to act. We urge them to read this report and to take action. They can no longer be allowed to ignore the consequences for the consumers that they are licensed to serve.” 

Summary of the report’s conclusions

Failure to monitor critical risks 

SEW lacked the processes and oversight to identify mitigate risks at Pembury Treatment Works, where various asset failures led to a two-week outage in Tunbridge Wells last year. Among the most significant errors, SEW failed to carry out the jar tests that the Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI) had directly advised them to do which would have allowed SEW to understand why their remedial interventions were failing. Having failed to action DWI’s recommendations, SEW was “flying blind” at the time of last year’s Pembury incident. This was a fundamental failure. 

Failure to maintain assets 

One of the most fundamental and basic responsibilities of a water company is to plan for and have the staff available to maintain assets, particularly assets that are most vulnerable. 

At the time of writing, Ofwat is consulting on issuing a fine of up to 8% of SEW’s annual turnover (£22.46 million). 

The DWI said that routine maintenance and cleaning were not undertaken at Pembury before the Tunbridge Wells incident. Ofwat’s investigation, between 2020 and 2023, flagged issues with the maintenance of reservoirs, bore holes and trunk mains. Not enough resourcing and planning to tackle these problems had been put in since the 2019 Price Review, despite in many cases being costed for. 

Failure to invest 

Regulators told South East Water repeatedly over four years that it needed to invest in new infrastructure to be resilient to potential shocks. Single points of failure (such as at Pembury), supply shortfalls and a lack of regional connectivity should have been improved. 

Spending allowances in previous price reviews, determined by Ofwat, likely made for difficult spending decisions, but ultimately these decisions are the company’s responsibility. Worse still, through successive price reviews, SEW has either not attempted or failed to make the necessary investment case. This suggests shareholders also deserve a share of the blame. 

Failure to plan 

SEW has regularly used increasing water demands, and extreme weather to explain its failings. Ofwat and the DWI have shown that the company failed to model upcoming peaks and troughs and take the necessary steps to boost resilience. Its leadership’s approach to incident response planning is pitiful; there are signs that incident response plans either do not exist or are of poor quality, having little or no stress-testing to improve them. 

Failure to respond, communicate and deliver for vulnerable customers 

There has been widespread criticism of SEW’s provision of bottled water stations and home deliveries for vulnerable residents. During the Tunbridge Wells incident last year, some preselected sites for water stations were quickly abandoned after realising they weren’t suitable, and only three stayed open. Provision was too reliant on residents having access to cars and SEW relied on local authorities to distribute bottled water and provide toilets in some areas. GP surgeries, schools, nurseries and the Tunbridge Wells Kidney Treatment Centre had gaps in support. Deliveries were left outside some vulnerable residents’ homes overnight without telling them, or in packages too heavy for some to lift. 

There were failings in its communications, with incorrect information issued about bottled water stations and wrong postcodes provided. Communications were said to contain poor choices of language and lacked empathy. Given the number of outages SEW has overseen, it is remarkable that the company failed to learn and apply lessons. 

Group-think and obfuscation 

SEW’s leadership team has demonstrated a clear pattern of blaming factors outside of their control, even despite clear evidence to the contrary. A lack of data-analysis skills might be partially to blame, but there is also a clear culture of obfuscating responsibility that is seriously inhibiting their ability to analyse problems and learn lessons. The company’s investigations, as well as that of the DWI, have identified potential issues with a lack of challenge or groupthink within the company. 

The company even attempted to secure an injunction to block Ofwat from publishing a report that contained pertinent information to credit agencies. 

Timeline of major incidents 

Ofwat stated in a report in March 2026 that, for a decade, SEW has had one of the worst water supply interruptions performance in the industry. 

• In February/March 2018, a freeze-thaw event saw three areas in SEW’s Eastern region experience supply interruptions for more than 12 hours. 26,705 customers lost tap water supply throughout the company’s patch, with up to 6,000 of those customers having no water for more than 48 hours.
• In August 2020, tens of thousands of SEW customers experienced low or no water pressure due to a “high demand” event as temperatures reached highs of 34C, in combination with a new trend of people working from home.
• In February 2022 Storm Eunice led to nearly 86,000 customers losing supply, with Sussex the hardest hit. The storm downed power networks which impacted “over 100 assets” belonging to SEW.
• In December 2022 a freeze-thaw event saw 85,000 customers affected. SEW paid out £3,723,545 in compensation to 24,763 household customers. Supply was lost as leaks resulted from burst water mains. SEW said it carried out 316 repairs.
• In June 2023 several schools were forced to close due to supply interruption when reservoirs ran low after low levels of rainfall. Ofwat said it opened an investigation following this event, as SEW’s response had been unsatisfactory.
• In January 2025, a power cut shut down a water treatment works that supplied 5,000 properties in Kent. Water supplies were restored after six days.  
• In March 2025, a burst pipe flooded a treatment station in west Kent, which affected 7,000 customers, some of whom were cut off for five days.
• In July 2025, 3,000 properties around Herne Bay, Kent, lost supply, some for six days. SEW said a heatwave at the time was to blame.
• November to December 2025: a failure at Pembury Treatment Works left 24,000 properties – including business, schools, health and care settings without clean drinking water across 14 days.
• January 2026: a freeze-thaw event and Storm Goretti left up to 30,000 customers without water for varying lengths of time between 10th and 19th January. 6,500 customers in Tunbridge Wells lost supply, having already been affected in the previous month. 

Hmm? – (Brings back memories from 45 years ago and a famous quote from David Steel) – Owl

It has been an election buildup dominated by the rise of Reform UK and the Greens, and the contrasting woes of Labour and the Tories. But there is a chance that on 8 May the Liberal Democrats, largely ignored in recent weeks, could wake up as the biggest party in English local government.

Peter Walker www.theguardian.com

This is just one of several paradoxes for the party’s leader, Ed Davey, and his team. They are fifth in many national polls, with a rating barely changed from 2024. But Lib Dem bosses are sanguine, convinced that UK politics is now so different, so atomised, to make headline polling almost irrelevant.

One senior Lib Dem said: “A lot of people seem to be misreading the way things are going. We think we have some of the answers.”

In one sense, the ambitions are familiar. Barring an unexpected change of fortunes, the Lib Dems will increase their total number of councillors for an unprecedented eighth set of local elections in a row.

A particularly good night for the party, plus heavy losses for the Conservatives, could result in the Lib Dems overtaking Kemi Badenoch’s party. If Labour fared very badly, there is an outside chance this second place could become first.

One party strategist said: “It’s not something we’re necessarily expecting this time – it’s more likely in a year or two. But for all the fuss about Reform, year after year we are quietly making gains. It’s the tortoise and the hare.”

Beyond the raw metrics there will be two main gauges of success for the Lib Dems. The first is consolidation or progress in “blue wall” areas where they took dozens of parliamentary seats from the Conservatives in 2024. “In places like Surrey we want to show we can finish the job on the Tories,” as one Lib Dem MP put it.

“I call it electoral bamboo,” another MP said. “I’m still surrounded by Conservatives, but we are spreading out quickly.”

The other gauge, which feels less certain, would be gains on councils which, in recent years, have been less promising ground for the Lib Dems, such as Birmingham and Preston.

It is the latter category where Lib Dem strategists hope to test out a campaigning model based on a mixture of rigorous voter targeting and being able to, as one planner put it, “cut through the noise” of an increasingly fragmented political system.

For the local elections, this is based around occasionally Reform-adjacent retail policies, such as a demand to cut fuel duty by 10p to help with costs from the Iran war, coupled with relentless attacks on Nigel Farage, particularly his closeness to Donald Trump.

The party is now running its biggest-ever programme of digital adverts, most targeting Farage, contrasting his support for Trump with Davey’s repeated willingness to criticise the US president.

“Iran has had real cut-through,” one Lib Dem MP said. “It’s not uncommon to have someone complain about potholes and then switch directly to the war and their worries about Trump.

“It is also really notable the number of doors you knock on where people say they are desperate for anyone except Reform to win. Farage is really polarising.”

This phenomenon is central to a strategy aimed mainly at the next general election but getting an initial try-out on 7 May. Based on huge amounts of internal polling, the Lib Dems are working on the basis that about half of voters will do whatever is necessary to block Reform in their local area.

One senior Lib Dem said: “We are seeing huge, huge, levels of tactical voting, in a way we haven’t seen before.” It is this context that makes the party relaxed about polling about who will definitely vote for them, and to focus more on those who would consider it, perhaps tactically.

With about a quarter of voters seen as strongly pro-Reform – the “burn everything down and start again” sector, as one Lib Dem official put it – another quarter are frustrated with the government and flatlining incomes, but uncertain where to go.

This is where campaigning is aimed, based on a mixture of retail policies centred on the cost of living and presenting the Lib Dems, particularly Davey, as able to understand their worries but without the baggage or discord that comes with Reform.

One senior Lib Dem said: “We don’t need to chase the 50% who are already anti-Reform. They will vote tactically regardless of almost anything else. In 2019 we tried to win just with these people and got hammered. It’s easy to boost polling numbers and lose seats.”

This will, however, at most be a partial test. Local elections are not general elections: turnout is lower, and many voters are less worried about a Reform-run council collecting their bins than the idea of Farage in Downing Street.

But there will be lessons to uncover, including whether the Lib Dems’ electoral ground game still works in a five-party battle, and if Davey, whose performance has prompted some grumblings among MPs, has the ambition and charisma to expand the party’s brand outside its strongholds.

Thus far, the mood feels hopeful. “There is more work to do, but we are getting towards being on the right track,” one MP said. “Some of the movement on economy is positive.”

But with the two-party system seemingly smashed and voter loyalty a memory, all predications come with caveats. This is new ground for everyone.

“I knocked on a door and a man said he wanted to vote for Restore Britain,” one MP said, referring to the Rupert Lowe-led start-up party that sits even further to the right than Reform. “When I told him they aren’t standing here he said: ‘Well, it’s probably you then.’ That was a first.”