South East Water outages prompt calls for lower housing targets for Wealden district

On Wednesday (June 28), Wealden District Council held an extraordinary meeting in the wake of a mass outage, which hit around 6,000 South East Water customers for several days.

The incident was the second mass water outage to take place within the district in the last year, with many of the same customers having been hit previously in the period leading up to Christmas 2022.

The meeting had been called by a cross-party group of councillors, who put forward a single motion for debate.

This motion was introduced by Independent councillor David White (Hellingly), who said: “There are two bodies that are responsible for where we are today. One is Ofwat and one is the government. Yes, South East Water fails to have a resilient plan in place, they know the housing growth is there, they know it should be coming and to say that they haven’t adequately provided is a gross admission of failure that should be penalised.”

He added: “But there is still, in my view, the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room is that water is a limited resource and the government is imposing unreasonable demands in terms of imposing additional housing numbers at a time when we have failing infrastructure.”

In full, the motion called on Liberal Democrat council leader James Partridge and chief executive Trevor Scott to write to South East Water asking for a full explanation of the recent failures and the full details of the steps being taken to address it.

It also called on Cllr Partridge and Mr Scott to write to both the water regulator Ofwat and the government, setting out the council’s concerns and asking for a reduction in housing targets “until there is a long term solution to the water shortage.”

Conservative councillors took the opportunity to criticise the Green/Lib Dem administration’s response to the water outages, arguing the council should have stood up an emergency response far sooner than it did.

Ann Newton, leader of the Conservative group, also took issue with the call for lower housing numbers within the motion. She said: “Writing to the minister of housing, communities and local government not only dilutes the fact that this problem is solely and very clearly down to South East Water but also highlights to Mr Gove that we are once again being critical of housing numbers and putting him one step closer to taking our planning powers away.”

But Kelvin Williams, Liberal Democrat cabinet member for public health and asset management, explained how the new, current council’s response to the incident followed the procedures which the previous council had actually followed.

He said: “Certainly, we were constantly pressing for what was necessary and how we could assist. It was consistently rebuffed by South East Water. To try and compare the incident that happened prior to Christmas to the one that happened recently is political shenanigans basically.”

An amendment tabled by the council’s Labour group, which called on the council to support South East Water going into public ownership, did not pass.