Frustration at burst water mains and lack of water supply: “Residents pay thousands each year in bills and deserve better”

South East Water admit that they lose 88.7 million litres a day due to leaks, and in February they announced a 10% increase on household bills. Cllr Macleod highlighted water leaks in the area, and frustration following this to be told in the summer people are being hit with restrictions due to the lack of rainfall, and Newhaven on a number of occasions recently has experienced issues of supply being unable to keep up with demand.

Sean Macleod, LibDem councillor for Newhaven North, says, “Our residents pay thousands each year in bills and deserve better. It is clear that we cannot trust commercial companies to keep our water supply and disposal safe and clean. We need to take water back into public ownership. Councillor MacCleary and I have spent hours on the phone trying to organize bottled water stations. We managed to get one for Denton area but then when most of Newhaven was without water, South East water said they were too busy.

"The dumping of sewage by Southern Water has become commonplace, and they regard even massive fines as a business cost, while they continue to pay outsize dividends and bonuses. They don't change and we have a government that doesn't want to do anything. We can't have our freshwater provider becoming just as thoughtless. We need to have a serious discussion about global warming and if the water companies are really prepared.”

According to a statement from South East Water: “South East Water’s average household bill is £242 a year or 66 pence a day for tap water supply. This is an increase of 9.48 per cent on last year – an average of 6p a day. The increase is due to inflation and will help with the significant costs the company is seeing for electricity and chemicals needed to produce drinking water at its treatment works and to pump it around its network of 9,000 miles of pipe.

“The amount the company can charge its customers for their clean drinking water supply is set every five years by the independent regulator Ofwat and takes in an agreed level of inflation which has been applied to bills in the next financial year. The package of investment and service levels that must be delivered, within these same price limits, is also set by Ofwat.

“South East Water plans its resources to deal with leakage, which includes 52 teams repairing leaks reactively and more than 60 leakage technicians searching for and finding leaks proactively.

“The company spends almost £40 million a year on managing and reducing leaks across the network. In the future the company plans to introduce new technologies to improve leak detection.”

Toby Willison, Southern Water’s Director of Environment and Quality, said: “The official Environment Agency data for 2022 shows a fall in overall storm overflow activity and we are already exceeding the government’s expectations for spills per overflow. However, we know this still isn’t good enough and are working extremely hard to drive down storm overflows."

To find out more go to www.southeastwater.co.uk/about/our-work/plans-to-reduce-leaks

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