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Communication, not supply, was the breakdown

A new report jointly commissioned by Ofwat and the Consumer Council for Water has concluded that communication, rather than supply failure itself, was the clearest and most consistent breakdown in South East Water’s response to two major disruptions last winter. Fewer than one in ten affected customers said they were satisfied with the reliability of communications about restoration timescales, and around half of customers in vulnerable circumstances who were registered for Priority Services said they did not receive the support they expected. The report found that 26% of customers affected in November – December 2025, rising to 41% in January 2026, did not feel it was clear how to access water that was safe to drink. Strikingly, around half of those affected now report keeping bottled water at home in case of future incidents, a behavioural shift that suggests lasting damage to confidence in tap supply.

Two major outages

The November–December 2025 outage followed problems at the Pembury Water Treatment Works near Tunbridge Wells, with an estimated 24,000 properties, affecting more than 60,000 customers, experiencing little or no access to drinking water for four to five days. The January 2026 outage potentially affected up to 69,000 properties across parts of Kent and East and West Sussex, the report describing it as a combination of weather-related and network resilience issues, freeze-thaw conditions causing multiple burst mains, and reduced treatment capacity. The research also suggested the biggest damage was not the loss of supply itself but the uncertainty, repeated changes to restoration times and a perception that the company was not fully in control.

Regulatory pressure mounts

The report comes alongside ongoing regulatory scrutiny. Ofwat opened an investigation into the company in January 2026 over compliance with its customer-focused licence condition, the first investigation Ofwat has launched on that licence condition. Separately, Ofwat has proposed a £22m fine over a series of supply failures between 2020 and 2023 that the regulator found affected more than 286,000 customers. South East Water serves around 2.2 million customers across Kent, Sussex and parts of Hampshire and Berkshire.