Southern to pay out at incoming compensation rates for Hampshire outage customers
On Friday, Southern Water confirmed water supply in the Hampshire area had been fully restored following a major incident at its Testwood water works which affected 58,000 customers.
Chief executive Lawrence Gosden described this as “the single biggest water supply incident in our company’s history”.
Gosden personally apologised and committed to a £9.7m compensation package at incoming Guaranteed Standards Scheme (GSS) rates, even though these will not be legally required until at least April. He said while the company mobilised quickly to remedy the technical fault, it fell short in its bottled water provision and service to priority customers. He promised a full review and lessons learned exercise.
Gosden added: “Unfortunately, similar incidents cannot be ruled out across the region in future. The new management team at Southern Water is determined to deliver improvements, and a turnaround for the company. But we have a lot of ageing infrastructure, like Testwood water works, which needs to be modernised or replaced. It should have been done a long time ago, but investment was squeezed as customer bills remained static for more than a decade. This badly needed investment is now coming, and is the main reason customer bills are going to rise significantly over the next five years.
“At Testwood itself over the next seven years, we’re going to invest a quarter of a billion pounds on improving the site for our customers. The money will be spent on modern equipment, making Testwood efficient and resilient – far less prone to failure.”
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