Tuesday 14 April, 09.30, committee
room 6, Palace of Westminster
The EFRA Committee will question the Chief Executive and Chair
of South East Water
(SEW), alongside a Non-Executive Director of
the company who
has led its investigation into a
two-week drinking water outage that affected the Tunbridge Wells
area last year.
In the same session, the Committee will later question
chiefs of Ofwat, the Drinking Water Inspectorate and the
Consumer Council for Water (full witness details
below).
The session follows a previous hearing on 6
January (summarised below), during which SEW's leadership
was accused of giving incomplete and
inaccurate evidence to the Committee about the Tunbridge
Wells outage in November and December 2025, which
left thousands of residents and businesses without clean drinking
water.
Following the completion of investigations by SEW and the
Drinking Water Inspectorate, the cross-party Committee
will examine the extent to which SEW was at fault
for the outage, which stemmed from an incident at the company's
Pembury Treatment Works.
There will be questions about SEW's handling
of previous and subsequent outages, including
infrastructure failures that impacted large areas
of Kent and Sussex this year. MPs will also
consider how the company engages with Ofwat and the Drinking
Water Inspectorate, and how it has taken
forward previous recommendations on how to
improve.
Ofwat has previously stated that SEW fails
to conduct proper “root cause analysis” after incidents that
should prompt improvements, and that it should not use
climate change related factors as a sufficient
explanation.
Last month the regulator issued SEW
with a £22million fine for failures between 2020 and
2023 and launched a fresh
investigation in January.
In the second panel, witnesses will be asked to reflect on what
the incidents involving SEW mean in terms of reforms to the water
sector.
Witnesses from 09.30:
- David Hinton, Chief Executive at South
East Water
- Chris Train OBE, Chair at South East Water
- Caroline Sheridan, Non-Executive Director at South
East Water
From 10.45:
- Markus Rink, Chief Inspectorate at Drinking Water
Inspectorate (DWI)
- Chris Walters, CEO at Ofwat
- Dr Mike Keil, CEO at Consumer Council for Water
What happened at the previous evidence
session?
The Committee's previous evidence session on 6 January
saw David Hinton and the Drinking Water Inspectorate
give conflicting accounts of whether the November-to-December
incident at Pembury Treatment Works was foreseeable and could
have been avoided.
Mr Hinton told the Committee that a coagulant chemical, which the
company relied on at Pembury to purify drinking water, became
ineffective. The company hypothesised that this was
because water levels in a reservoir had fallen during a drought
earlier in the year, causing the chemistry of the water supply to
change. A new type of coagulant had to be sourced before service
could be restored, Mr Hinton said.
Appearing immediately after Mr
Hinton, Marcus Rink contradicted this explanation. He
said the incident should “not have been a surprise” and was
instead due to factors that Mr Hinton had not explained. These
included: poor filter performance and reduced backwash capacity,
reliance on manual interventions, and a “lack of online
performance visibility meaning that they were ‘flying
blind' and unable to intervene with coagulant dose”. He
added that had SEW carried out a recent "jar
test", a means of testing coagulant efficacy, the
original coagulant would have worked.
In subsequent
correspondence with the Committee, the Chair of SEW,
Chris Train, said Pembury had experienced a “very complex
combination” of circumstances with “limited precedent”, and
so the event was therefore “not foreseeable”.
ENDS
Note to editors:
The Committee has received in confidence the DWI's
report into the Pembury Treatment Works incident and a
preliminary report by South East Water. Both
organisations will publish their own reports in due
course – further enquiries should be directed to them.
