The Government has welcomed the EFRA Committee's damning report
into South East Water (SEW), which prompted the
resignations of its Chair and Chief Executive.
Read the Government's
response here.
In its May report,
MPs stated they had lost confidence in the company's
senior leadership and its ability to turn the firm around.
The report highlighted many long-term failings, such as
maintenance and monitoring of infrastructure, a failure to
communicate with customers and to respond to serious
outages. A lack of accountability between SEW's board and
executive also stood in the way of improvement MPs
concluded that new leadership was needed.
In the response, Defra Minister writes: The Government is
grateful to the Committee for its thorough scrutiny of
these important issues and welcomes its continued
engagement as we work together to strengthen the water sector.
The failures at South East Water were unacceptable, and
the Government is committed to delivering the reforms necessary
to drive lasting improvements and reduce the risk of similar
failures occurring in the future.
Hardy adds that it was right that SEW's
leadership has taken responsibility, and outlines
proposals in the forthcoming Clean Water Bill.
EFRA Committee Chair MP said:
Our scrutiny of South East Water goes to show that
where we see evidence of serious or systemic failure in
the drinking water sector, we will be
ready to hold bosses to account.
However, it is a poor indictment of the system
that it falls to a parliamentary select
committee to ensure that the
sector makes better decisions. We look forward to
the Government bringing forward its Clean Water Bill and kicking
the tyres on Defra's plans to get a grip of this deeply troubled
sector.
The Committee's scrutiny of SEW came after a two-week drinking
water outage in Tunbridge Wells in November and December 2025,
and further outages in January across parts of Kent and
Sussex.
