MP demands water boss resigns after thousands in Tunbridge Wells without water for three days
An MP has called for the boss of South East Water to resign after thousands of homes and many businesses in Tunbridge Wells were left without water for the third day in a row.
Mike Martin, the Liberal Democrat MP for the Kent town, described the situation as “an absolute disgrace” and said vulnerable and elderly people were suffering as a direct result of the “failure of leadership” shown by the water company’s chief executive David Hinton.
South East Water has confirmed that supply issues in the Tunbridge Wells area are due to a fault at the local Pembury Water Treatment Plant.
The plant was forced to close Saturday night after a “bad mix of chemicals” disrupted operations and local drinking water storage tanks were running low.
The company said the plant was now resuming normal service but warned supplies would not be operating normally again until Tuesday as the system was slowly pressurized and dealing with air locks in the pipes.
Some 23,000 homes and buildings were left without water and Southeastern Water set up bottled water distribution points.
Matthew Dean, South East Water’s incident manager, said: Independent: “I would like to apologize to all our customers who were left without water or had low pressure in Tunbridge Wells tonight.
“More than 5,000 properties have already had their water restored and more are expected to have drinking water restored overnight and into tomorrow morning. [Tuesday]. Currently, the number of residences without water is around 18,000.
“Customers may experience discoloration when their water supply is restored. This is normal and occurs when naturally occurring deposits that have settled and accumulated in our water main network over time deteriorate.”
Mr Dean added: “We continue to transport water via our network and have tanked more than 5 million liters of water into the city and distributed more than 369,000 liters of bottled water to supply as many customers as possible.”
Speaking to reporters in the pouring rain, Mr Martin repeatedly called for Mr Hinton’s resignation, saying the company had not learned its lessons after the six-day water outage in 2022.
“Dave Hinton, the chief executive of South Eastern Water, which earns half a million pounds a year, should resign,” Mr Martin told the BBC. “This is a complete failure of leadership. This has happened before. We went without water for six days in 2022 and he promised both publicly and to me privately that lessons would be learned in crisis management, communication and resilience. All of this turned out to be completely wrong. This is a leadership issue and he needs to resign now.”
He added: “We’ve had vulnerable people who can’t self-catheterise, we’ve had care homes without water, we’ve had people queuing for hours. Towns are congested, businesses are closed, restaurants have lost thousands of lira. This is an absolute disgrace. He should resign.”
Asked about calls for Mr Hinton’s resignation, Mr Dean said: Independent: “Our focus is entirely on returning materials to our customers as quickly as possible.
“Once we have returned the materials to all customers, a full investigation into what happened will take place.”
