South East commissions £50m plant and launches livestock register

(by Karma Loveday)

South East Water last week reported progress on two fronts in its efforts to increase water supply resilience.

It commissioned its £50m Butler Water Treatment Works in Aylesford, Kent, which will supply up to an extra 20m litres of water every day into the network. Construction was completed in March, and work is now underway to plan a new strategic pipeline that will help move this new water, when required, across the county. South East Water managed to acquire an abstraction licence previously used by Aylesford Newsprint after it closed in 2015, enabling the plant to be supplied. 

The company also last week launched what it said was an industry-first: a livestock register to help it tailor alternative water support directly to agricultural customers during outages.

The register aims to ensure that critical support is on the ground within 48 hours of an outage, with emergency teams prioritising areas facing the highest animal welfare risks. Smallholders with five or fewer animals will be able to collect bulk or bottled water from nearby filling points. For those with six or more animals, South East Water will use reasonable endeavours to provide water direct to site, through either emergency bottled water for young or vulnerable stock, mobile bowsers, strategically placed static tanks, or direct bulk tanker deliveries straight into on-farm storage tanks.

This follows feedback from farmers after previous incidents that water outages posed an immediate threat to animal welfare and farm livelihoods.

• Water minister Emma Hardy has thanked the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (EFRA) Committee for its damning report on Failures at South East Water and welcomed the subsequent resignation of the company leaders.

Responding to the report on behalf of the Government, she said: “It is right that South East Water’s leadership has taken responsibility for the ongoing failures. The resignations of the chair and chief executive reflect the seriousness of what has happened, and the company must now make the changes needed to turn its performance around. Government and regulators will continue to work with South East Water through regular performance meetings during the company’s transition to new leadership.”

Hardy added: “The failures at SEW have reinforced the Government’s determination to deliver the most significant reform of the water sector since privatisation.”

EFRA Committee chair Alistair Carmichael MP commented: “It is a poor indictment of the system that it falls to a parliamentary select committee to ensure that the sector makes better decisions. We look forward to the Government bringing forward its Clean Water Bill and kicking the tyres on Defra’s plans to get a grip of this deeply troubled sector.”

The Committee’s scrutiny of South East Water came after a two-week drinking water outage in Tunbridge Wells in November and December 2025, and further outages in January across parts of Kent and Sussex.