South East Water (SEW) is being investigated by regulator Ofwat after repeated outages since November have left tens of thousands of households and businesses across Kent and Sussex without drinking water.

The news came after the government asked the watchdog to review the company’s licence.

With some properties entering a sixth day without water, the water watchdog said it was investigating whether the supplier had breached its licence conditions by failing to meet its customer service standards obligations or by offering appropriate support to affected customers.

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Outrage from elderly residents at water outage

Tunbridge Wells suffered a sustained outage in November and December, with 24,000 properties in and around the Kent town left without drinkable water for almost two weeks.

Lynn Parker, Ofwat senior director for enforcement, said: “The last six weeks have been miserable for businesses and households across Kent and Sussex with repeated supply problems.

“We know that this has had a huge impact on all parts of daily life and hurt businesses, particularly in the run-up to the festive period.

“That is why we need to investigate and to determine whether the company has breached its licence condition.”

On Tuesday, Ofwat said it was concerned that 23,000 properties were still affected by outages across the counties where a major incident was declared the previous day.

SEW said on Wednesday morning that supplies had been restored to 8,000 properties across the two counties, but later said the total was 16,000.

However, it did confirm that the 6,500 properties in Tunbridge Wells that had been on a “boosted system” had lost supplies for the day.

In a statement, SEW incident manager Matthew Dean supplies “have now been returned to 15,000 properties in East Grinstead and supplies should be returned to the remaining 1,500 properties tonight [Wednesday].

The outages were blamed on power cuts and burst pipes caused by Storm Goretti overnight between Friday and Saturday last week.

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SEW said in a statement on its website it was “extremely sorry to all customers who currently have no water or low pressure,” along with details of affected areas and locations of six bottled water stations, three in each county.

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