Ofwat seeks freeze/thaw performance data as MPs blast South East Water outages

Ofwat has written to water companies seeking information on their performance during the December freeze-thaw event.

Senior director of strategy, finance and infrastructure John Russell asked for the following information by 28 February, to understand whether companies demonstrated an appropriate level of resilience and customer support:

• details of the impact of the freeze/thaw in your company area, including: underlying causes of any impacts; numbers of properties and customers experiencing problems; length of time to resolve outages;

• a full and candid explanation of your company’s response to any impacts, including: communication with customers; mutual aid with other companies; distributions of bottled water; and identification of vulnerable customers and the support provided for them;

• arrangements for compensation to impacted customers;

• lessons learned from this experience and changes you intend to implement; and

• whether lessons learned from the 2018 freeze-thaw and recommendations from Ofwat's Out In The Cold review have been implemented.”

Last week, Conservative MP for Tunbridge Wells Greg Clarke led a debate in Parliament about the performance of South East Water during the freeze thaw event. He relayed personal accounts of some of the thousands of his constituents who were off supply for up to eight days in the run up to Christmas, including the closure of a dialysis unit. In explaining the failures, he pointed to a “catalogue of failures over the preceding weeks that exposed a network lacking in the resilience needed to do the job of supplying water reliably to our residents”.

Clarke called for a “reckoning” for South East Water and asked water minister Rebecca Pow to support a beyond-statutory compensation package for individuals and the community and to obtain “an urgent plan from South East Water to increase — indeed, to guarantee — the security of our water supplies against things that have the potential to disrupt them, whether they be power cuts, floods or freezing weather? Every action that can make a difference should be assessed urgently, and measures should be fast-tracked now.”

Pow reported she had met with South East Water’s chief executive as part of the incident response, and had requested a “wash up meeting” to further scrutinise lessons learned. She said: “Let me make it really clear: South East Water must act urgently to significantly improve its performance for customers and address the issues that lead to loss of supply.” She cited statutory minimum compensation levels but accepted the company could go above and beyond these, if it chose.