Ofwat summons South East Water board to discuss outages

Following the recent prolonged outages in parts of South East Water’s supply area and the imposition of a hosepipe ban, Ofwat’s chief executive and chair have requested an urgent meeting with the board of South East Water.

They want to discuss the performance issues and the causes; the customer impacts; how reliability will be improved in future; how the company communicated with customers during the outage, and what compensation package it plans to offer.

In a letter, Ofwat chief, David Black, said the recent episode, where 6,000 properties were impacted during the week of 12 June as demand soared, came hot on the heels of December 2022’s freeze thaw event which affected 286,000 properties. Black said he was concerned the new interruptions occurred during the “first spell of hot weather this year” and that South East is one of the worst performers on supply interruptions across the past two years.

“This suggests that the resilience of supplies is well below what would be expected from an essential service provider and that transformative change is required at South East Water to ensure customers receive the levels of service they deserve,” he said.

The meeting will inform Ofwat’s decisions on whether further action is needed.