You rely on us to supply top-quality drinking water to your taps 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Despite our ongoing programme to upgrade our infrastructure, burst pipes, site failures or third-party damage to our network can sometimes happen.
Our target for 2024/25 was for each property we serve to be impacted on average by an interruption for less than five minutes.
How have we performed?
Of the 2,092 mains repairs completed in the year, 2,083 were completed with no impact or less than 30 seconds impact on the overall interruption minutes target.
There were seven network repairs to trunk mains (mains 6-inch diameter or larger that are difficult to isolate and rezone) or complex below ground failures in Sussex contributed 13.6 minutes to the total
There were two supply asset/treatment work incidents in Kent contributed 20.85 minutes to the overall total
The average interruption during the year was 44.06 minutes per property resulting in a £3.373 million payment.
Our performance was severely impacted by the two large source water events, the most impactful being a power related failure following a named storm event at our water treatment works in Sevenoaks in January 2025, which resulted in flooding of the site from the artesian source water and subsequent airlocking of the supply network once supplies were re-started.
In March 2025 we lost a key site in the Trottiscliffe area of Kent, which flooded following a pipework failure onsite, this shorted the electrical panels and pumps which had to be immediately and safely repaired or replaced once the flood waters had been cleared before outputs from the site could be re-established. These two incidents alone accounted for 20.85 of the 44.04 total minutes interruptions for the year
We continue to operate an improvement programme to help identify, track and implement new initiatives to help reduce interruptions to your supply. This programme includes network learning and incident management workshops which have been running throughout the year.
Going forward we are focusing on delivering solutions in our Kent and Sussex regions to provide more resilience against extreme weather and asset failure.
