Overview
- At a Tuesday hearing of Parliament’s Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, South East Water’s chair said CEO David Hinton will forgo his bonus as Hinton told MPs he “got it wrong” in handling recent outages.
- Hinton reversed earlier claims that problems were unforeseeable, acknowledging clear warning signs from November 9 at the Pembury treatment works, slow maintenance and repairs, poor communication, and a reactive culture.
- The board said it will keep Hinton in post and bring in external hires to strengthen the executive team, and the company has adopted a crisis communications playbook and set up a £600,000 fund for affected local businesses.
- Ofwat plans to fine the company £22 million for failures from 2020 to 2023 that hit more than 286,000 people, and its chief executive told MPs the regulator is seeing some progress but will keep monitoring performance.
- Outages left around 24,000 properties in Tunbridge Wells without safe water for nearly two weeks last winter and disrupted thousands more in Kent and Sussex in January, closing schools and missing 70 of nearly 35,000 bottled-water deliveries to vulnerable customers.