Tunbridge Wells residents without water again as supplier blames cold weather

Residents of Tunbridge Wells have been left without water again, just a month after a major outage.South East Water said 6,500 households have no water at all, while thousands more have “intermittent supplies”.It blamed the cold weather for the disruption, which caused a “series of burst water mains”. The company had previously been found to be spending more paying dividends and servicing its debt pile over two years than investing in infrastructure.The company said it had set up water bottle stations and was delivering water to priority customers. “Our water treatment works in the area are working at full capacity and tankers are pumping water directly into the storage tanks and the network to restore supplies as quickly as possible,” Nick Bell, incident manager for the water company, said.“We also have teams working round the clock repairing leaks and bursts,” he added.South East Water predicted there would be low and intermittent water supply throughout Thursday, but the local MP, the Liberal Democrat Mike Martin, said the issue could persist for days.He said: “The issue is the number of leaks draining the reservoir – SEW are currently fixing a number of leaks which will allow them to stabilise the reservoir levels. I don’t have confidence that this will be tomorrow – ie that water will be fully restored tomorrow. I think it will be intermittent for a few days.”From 30 November last year 24,000 homes in the Tunbridge Wells area were without drinking water for two weeks due to a failure at the Pembury water treatment centre.Earlier this week the chief executive of South East Water, David Hinton, came under fire at the environment, food and rural affairs parliamentary select committee after he suggested that people working from home were responsible for water shortages.The chief inspector at the Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI) refuted this claim during the same hearing and said the outage last year was foreseeable and could have been prevented.It was due to problems at the ageing Pembury water treatment works, which has been under an enforcement order from the DWI since 2024. Water companies have been accused of failing to invest in infrastructure including treatment centres, reservoirs and pipes, and instead paying profits to shareholders.Alistair Carmichael, the Liberal Democrat MP and chair of the committee, has written to the chair of South East Water, demanding an immediate response. In his letter, he said: “The chief inspector of the Drinking Water Inspectorate raised serious questions about the accuracy and intent of the information provided to the Committe e… Having reflected on the evidence session yesterday it appears to me that, in addition to examination of the company’s response to the outage last year, there are issues of corporate governance that likely warrant public scrutiny.”South East Water has said it is reviewing the letter.