Holding water companies to account

Nus Ghani – Wealden MP

Wealden always looks stunning with a bit of snow in the morning, but unfortunately, the end of last year exposed vulnerabilities in our infrastructure. When the icy spell hit in December, leaky or burst pipes meant that South East Water (SEW) reservoirs in the Tunbridge Wells area were drained of their necessary capacity and unfortunately, this resulted in many homes in Eridge, Crowborough, Mayfield, and Wadhurst areas losing water for several days.

Running up to Christmas, I had many angry exchanges with SEW staff including the Chief Executive every day of the outage, and I could not get any sensible response, especially with regards to when water would be returned and what additional support was being provided to vulnerable residents, who were my priority. SEW inflicted unnecessary distress on so many local residents at a time when many families were preparing for Christmas, and I recognise the strength of feeling on the failure of their service locally.

I have been campaigning for full financial compensation and for many it has been forthcoming, but I was most concerned by reports that some residents have either not received compensation or have been told that they were not eligible for it. To assess the scale of this problem, I launched a dedicated platform on my website to gather evidence, and I was shocked to receive several hundred submissions. Please know that I have secured a further meeting with SEW, where I will use this data to push for compensation for all affected customers without delay.

Further south in Wealden, residents of Hailsham and Hellingly faced the opposite problem in January, when heavy rainfall resulted in severe flooding and sewage discharges into people’s gardens. Getting a response from Southern Water and the Environment Agency has been appalling. I was regularly updated by the Parish Council that they were unable to obtain a response either, so I convened a meeting with representatives of the Parish Council, Wealden District Council, East Sussex County Council, East Sussex Highways and Southern Water directly on site in Hellingly to hold the water company and the Environment Agency to account.

I share everyone’s frustration at the lack of planning and the speed of response when such disruptive events take place in Wealden. It is clear that SEW and Southern Water just aren’t investing enough in their infrastructure and have a resilience problem. While severe weather conditions may be an explanation for the disruptions, they is not an acceptable excuse, and I am again incredibly disappointed that lessons do not appear to have been learnt.

I appreciate the misery that both the water outage and the flooding have caused to many households in the constituency. Please be assured that I am pursuing both matters further and will continue to push for more funding for critical infrastructure, better performance and response rate from these companies, and for regular updates on resilience and future planning with local communities.