As your drinking water supplier, we know that at times we’ve not provided the service you expect from us in recent years.
In the last few years we have experienced record-breaking weather in the summers of 2022 and 2023 and at South East Water, we have regrettably had several drinking water supply interruptions that have impacted our customers.
Charing, Challock and Molash are among the areas to have experienced interruptions in the past few years, with customers going without water for several days in July 2022 as temperatures soared in one of the driest and hottest months on record in the UK.
Despite working around the clock, we were unable to treat water and maintain regular supplies. Drinking water was being drawn out from elsewhere in our network before reaching elevated areas such as Challock.
Levels at our Charing service reservoir fell quickly and the pumps supplying Challock and Molash were not able to run day and night to keep up with the demand for top-quality drinking water.
This interruption to the supply of drinking water in east Kent was unacceptable for both customers and us and we recognise that our service fell short of the high standards expected.
We know we can’t change that now, but please be assured we are investing more than £50 million to put things right and working hard to pump more water into the area to ensure we can keep your taps flowing.
What we are doing about it
Since then, we have conducted a thorough review of what happened and learned lessons for the future from what went wrong, giving us a better understanding of how we can change the direction of water flows around our network to keep customers’ taps flowing.
We are also investing to help future-proof our network, with new pumps being installed to ensure that we can push water consistently to the high ground in the area and an increase of one million litres of water being made available, which is enough drinking water for an additional 6,000 people each day.
We are investing £12 million to install 16 kilometres of new water main in two phases in east Kent, including from Warren Street to Charing.
The first phase of the project is now nearing completion, with more than eight kilometres of pipeline laid to date. This includes in the Wichling and Doddington areas and from Warren Street to the Pilgrims Way carriageway in Charing.
The second phase of the project will follow from Charing to Potters Corner to ensure we can continue to provide top-quality drinking water in the east Kent area and give us more flexibility to move water around the network more easily at times of disruption.
Meanwhile, a new £39 million state-of-the-art water treatment works is being built nearby on a section of the old Aylesford Newsprint site.
Work is underway to develop the site and it is hoped it will be fully operational by March 2025.
Once built, this will take water from underground sources and treat it to provide up to 20 million litres of drinking water per day to be pumped into the local area for decades to come as the population grows in Kent.
We also plan to build a brand-new reservoir at Broad Oak in Canterbury by the mid-2030s to ensure the security of the water supply and deliver a reliable service for all of our customers in Kent.
This is important to us and please be assured that we are doing what we can to strengthen our network and provide you with the public water service you expect and deserve, with plans to spend £1.9 billion across our regions over five years from 2025 as part of our most ambitious five-year plan, which we submitted to Ofwat last year.