South East Water updates on remedial progress

(by Verity Mitchell)

South East Water (SEW), under the spotlight for its many infrastructure and customer service failures, has published an update on its plan to improve resilience.

This follows the £22m fine recently announced by Ofwat for historic interruptions to supply between 2020 and 2023. South East Water had tried and failed to prevent the announcement with an injunction. Now it needs to restore regulatory and customer confidence.

Its plan involves both engineering works to improve its infrastructure, and accelerated operational changes to manage interruptions to supply. The work is focused on areas of high population in its area: Tunbridge Wells, Maidstone, Canterbury, Whitstable, East Grinstead and Crowborough.

The update gave details of operational improvement works that commenced in February. This follows widespread criticism of its handling of the failure of its Pembury Water Treatment Plant in November and the lack of efficient response to customers suffering from the resultant interruptions to supply.

These remedies will be funded by shareholders, not customers, and will take place in addition to SEW delivering its AMP8 programme.

This action plan is supplemented by the appointment of two new executives: Matt Webb, formally of UKPN and EDF; and Paul Lonsdale, who worked in the Anglian Water @One Alliance. Their new roles are technology and insight director and investment delivery director respectively.

The list of remedial works includes: the upgrading of mains and network connections to reservoirs, accelerating water treatment plant improvements, installing batteries to protect against power outages, and installing temporary water tanks for emergency treated water provision. SEW is also digitising its emergency water supply operations and has reviewed and improved supplies needed for critical health entitles such as hospitals. More generally it has identified better distribution locations for customer access to emergency bottled water.

An independent review of the failings around the Pembury water treatment plant last November is ongoing and will be presented in April.