December of 2025 and January 2026 saw our customers experience two of the most challenging incidents the business has experienced.
We are very sorry to all our customers in Tunbridge Wells, Kent and Sussex who were impacted by both these outages.
Over the course of three months in Tunbridge Wells in particular, the community experienced two distinct, major supply issues for which we are very sorry.
As the provider responsible for this essential service, we recognise we fell far short of the standards our customers rightly expect.
Tunbridge Wells, December 2025
Treatment issues at our Pembury Water Treatment Works, which supplies drinking water to Tunbridge Wells, occurred in November 2025.
Initially 26,000 customers in the town were impacted before this was reduced to 6,500 on 3 December when we took the decision to restart the water treatment works to pump water to customers to enable them to flush toilets and wash.
While the water was chemically safe, with an abundance of caution, we issued an instruction to boil tap water before using it for drinking or cooking. This was a precautionary measure which we kept in place until 12 December while all the water we produced was flushed through the entire water network.
During the incident, we were able to continue to support our Priority Service Register (PSR) customers, care homes, hospitals, GP surgeries, childcare nurseries and schools with alternative water.
Our teams made more than 38,000 deliveries to around 5,000 customers on our PSR while also responding to requests from other vulnerable customers not already on the PSR.
We supplied more than 30 million litres of alternative water to the area through our new water tankers and bottled water stations.
We recognise how difficult this period was for both residents and business of Tunbridge Wells in the run up to Christmas.
We ensured compensation was paid swiftly, and went over and above our Guaranteed Standards of Service by removing caps on compensation and discounting periods where some customers may have had water.
Kent and Sussex, January 2026
Following the cold weather we experienced in early January, coupled with issues caused by Storm Goretti, we faced a range of issues which impacted our ability to supply water to customers in parts of Kent and Sussex.
Again, we are very sorry to the 25,000 properties affected between 6 and 20 January.
The rapid warming of the ground following the cold weather caused ground movement, which resulted in an outbreak of leaks and bursts across our supply area both on customer properties and on our pipeline network.
While we were prepared for this, and had extra resources in place to undertake repairs as quickly as possible, this reduced the amount of water available in our drinking water storage tanks which supply the area. This was compounded by us not receiving the amount of water we normally do from neighbouring water companies who provide us with a bulk supply of water as they were facing their own issues following the weather impacts. Around 20 per cent of the water supplied to Maidstone and the surrounding area comes from these bulk water supplies.
Issues caused by Storm Goretti such as power outages, also compounded the problems we were facing.
Due to the significant scale of the event, we distributed 1.7 million litres of bottled water through our nine bottled water stations and three local community hubs.
Alongside this we issued almost 500,000 litres of bottled water to care homes, nurseries, schools, GP surgeries and hospitals.
We also had 26 tankers injecting water directly into pipeline networks to maintain supplies to as many customers as possible, as well as directly into drinking water storage tanks across Kent and Sussex. In total 57 million litres of water was tankered into the system.
The future
Moving forward, our focus has shifted from reactive repair to infrastructure renewal.
Projects planned include:
- Investing in providing new sustainable water resources for our regions, such as a new reservoir at Broad Oak, near Canterbury – We aim to deliver water from the reservoir from 2035.
- Improve network resilience by making the most efficient connections in our networks to enable us to move water around more effectively. This will allow us to provide the public water service more efficiently in areas of recent challenge, such as to customers near the end of networks.
- Increase the capacity of drinking water storage available in the right locations, to improve resilience and provide a greater buffer in order to reduce the risk of supply interruptions.
- Work with customers – both household and non-household - to identify water efficiency - as it is important that we all reduce the amount of water that is being used at home and in businesses. We will commence a smart meter roll out in this business cycle which will see 275,000 meters implemented, with the roll out completed by 2035. We have already started this, in the Canterbury and Whitstable areas. Smart meters allow customers and us to help spot leaks at an earlier stage.
- Implement a smart water network with a comprehensive roll out of additional meters, sensors, and loggers. This allows for dynamic management of the network to reduce leakage and improve resilience.
- Use of other innovations to drive down leakage even further, reducing the amount of drinking water lost through leaks and burst mains. Historically, we have been one of the best performers in the water industry on reducing leaks and our ambition is to return to this position.
- Work with partners to improve the quality of raw water entering our catchments. We want to continue and enhance the work started in the last business plan to improve the quality of river water in our region.
- Build three new nitrate treatment plants to address increasing nutrient levels in the raw water, that will breach nitrate trigger levels before catchment solutions are able to mitigate and reverse the trends seen.
- Provide additional resources required to respond to unplanned supply interruptions when they happen, giving us more options to support all customers and return the mains supply as quickly as we possibly can.
- Continue to deliver excellent drinking water quality.
- And all of this will be achieved whilst ensuring that we tackle water poverty, increasing the support we give to vulnerable customers through a new six-point plan. We want to remove water poverty altogether by 2030.
We will keep all our customers up-to-date with these projects and how they are progressing, as we are determined to improve our resilience and performance.