Water supply failures for thousands of properties

More than 4,600 South East Water customers have low pressure or no supply at all due to maintenance at a treatment works and a burst main, the water firm says.

Engineers were completing "urgent maintenance to electrical equipment", which affected supply to Bredgar, Borden, Doddington and Teynham in Kent on Saturday.

South East water said it expected supplies to return late on Sunday morning and it would deliver water to all impacted properties by 22:00 BST.

The announcement came after thousands of customers in Tonbridge were left without water for the second weekend in a row after a burst main.

A bottled water station opened at Tonbridge Farm Sports Centre for 1,300 customers who remained without water, although about 2,200 customers had seen their supply restored.

The west Kent town sawtwo days of disruption from 1 August, which left 7,600 properties without water at its peak.

South East Water apologised for the disruption and said on Saturday afternoon it was "taking us longer than expected" to locate the burst main.

The firm said a different pipe had burst to the one that caused the previous supply failure.

In the north of the county, South East Water said its treatment works had to be "temporarily shut down" to complete the repairs.

"While this work was originally planned for later this weekend, it had to be brought forward due to the wider power issues being experienced in the Sittingbourne area," the company said.

As well as making deliveries, the firm opened bottled water stations at Asda and at Morrisons in Sittingbourne.

In other parts of Kent, more than 3,000 properties in Sutton Valence, Headcorn, Ulcombe and Kingswood were also left without water earlier this week, but supplies are now beginning to return.

In July, the firm's new boss John Halsall said he had faced a "huge challenge" in improving South East Water's performance and reputation.

He took over from David Hinton, who earned £400,000 and was awarded a £115,000 bonus in 2024.

Regulator Ofwat also said in July the company had to spend £30.5m on improvements after a number of outages in recent years, including several in Tunbridge Wells.

The issues also come amid a period of prolonged hot and dry weather, which has prompted a hosepipe ban for 2.4 million South East Water customers.

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