South East Water hit with £30m fine after supply chaos

South East Water has been fined more than £30m after the taps ran dry for thousands of customers across Kent and Sussex late last year.

South East Water has been fined more than £30m after the taps ran dry for thousands of customers across Kent and Sussex late last year. The water regulator Ofwat said the beleaguered water company had not communicated clearly with customers about outages and did not provide adequate bottled water supplies. It has fined South East Water a total of £30.5m over a series of outages, including supply disruption in Tunbridge Wells last November and after Storm Goretti in January, which left up to 70,000 homes without supply.

The fine relates to three investigations into the water business and includes a £22m penalty for further failures between 2020 and 2023. "Customers had no tap water, were unable to shower or bathe and faced long delays when travelling to and queuing at bottled water stations," the regulator said. "Some had to cancel work due to school closures and others had difficulty dealing with medical conditions."

Almost half of the fine, £13m, will go towards fixing the causes of the failures at South East Water, with only £1.5m dedicated to a community fund to provide support for areas in Kent and Sussex that were affected by the supply failures. Helen Campbell, an executive director at Ofwat, said: "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." This is a breaking story