The nightmare water disaster in a Kent town that could be coming to you
A British town in 2025 has gone without guaranteed clean water for nearly two weeks. Here's what it highlights about the state of UK infrastructure
Royal Tunbridge Wells – the Kent town which has become synonymous with middle-class affluence – has not had certifiably clean, running water for 11 days now.
And for five days from the evening of 29 November, there was no water at all.
Increasingly frazzled residents relied on bottled mineral water for everything from washing the dishes to hydrating pets. Queuing for bottles at distribution centres became a part of daily life.
On one particularly inclement day, locals collected rainwater in buckets just so they could flush their loos.
As a Tunbridge Wells resident, my family has been one of the approximately 24,000 households affected.
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The running water has been back for us since Wednesday 3 December, but it is subject to a boil water notice, meaning it can only be drunk or used for a variety of other purposes, such as cooking, if it is boiled first.
There has been no word from the supplier, South East Water, about when normality will resume. Until further notice, bottles remain the order of the day for drinking, cooking, brushing teeth, washing surfaces and cleaning hands.
If we want to give our two young boys a bath we’re reliant on the kindness of friends who live a 10-mintue car drive away in homes outside the affected zone.
While the episode has been a frustrating inconvenience for us, the consequences have been far more severe for many others.
Elderly and vulnerable residents have been reliant on neighbours to collect water. Care homes and GP practices have struggled to adapt. Nurseries, schools, pubs and restaurants have been forced to shut, with hospitality businesses losing tens of thousands of pounds at what should be their busiest time of the year.
A population of more than 100,000 has been plunged into days of chaos. The fact that a British town in 2025 could go without guaranteed clean water for approaching two weeks raises urgent questions about the state of the water industry and the resilience of our critical infrastructure.
The Drinking Water Inspectorate has announced it is investigating. MPs on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Efra) Committee have summoned the chief executive of South East Water, Dave Hinton, and the DWI for a grilling next month.
Alistair Carmichael, a Liberal Democrat MP and chair of the Efra Committee, said he feared Tunbridge Wells may not be a one off. “Could this happen again? On the basis that past behaviour is a good predictor of future conduct, almost certainly yes,” he told The i Paper.
What caused the Tunbridge Wells water crisis?
Piecing together the sequence of events is difficult, mainly because South East Water has refused to share almost any information about what triggered the outage. The firm’s communication with customers has been condemned, particularly the absence of Hinton, who has not given a single interview since the incident started.
Initially, the water company blamed a “bad chemical batch” at its Pembury Water Treatment Works. Deadlines for the water returning were repeatedly set and missed. After a few days – and with service restored to some but not all households – the firm said “water quality issues” had reoccurred in the treatment works. Water was subsequently restored across the network but with the boil notice in effect.
A lot of the scrutiny has focused on the condition of the Pembury works. This is due to the fact that last year, South East Water flagged to the DWI that there was a “significant risk of supplying water” from the works, which “could constitute a potential danger to human health or could be unwholesome”.
The company’s water supply director, Douglas Whitfield, has denied the state of the plant is to blame. Last week he told the BBC that the outage had “not been to do with the asset health or the failure of assets” but was related to “raw water challenges and the ability of the treatment process to cope with that”.
The i Paper understands that the problem related to “turbidity” – essentially the amount of suspended particles in the “raw” water of a reservoir.
To lower turbidity to a safe level, coagulant chemicals (the “chemical batch” South East Water referred too) are added to the water to make the particulate matter stick together. It forms a “sludge blanket” while the clarified water is drawn off for further treatment.
A source familiar with what happened at Pembury said: “All of a sudden the chemicals they put in to coagulate, they stopped working.” The source said it was not clear whether this was due to an “inert” batch of chemicals, or to changes in the reservoir’s underlying water chemistry. If it was the chemistry, then it is not yet clear what altered it.
The i Paper asked South East Water what happened at Pembury, but the company declined to provide a detailed explanation. It would only say that the boil notice remained because of the “water quality issues that caused the initial shutdown of our water treatment works in Pembury”.
Ageing reservoirs mean ‘it could happen elsewhere’
A water industry source told The i Paper that if the problem were related to the water chemistry, then this was not necessarily fullly within South East Water’s control. “[Water companies] have no control over the quality of the water as it enters the reservoir,” they said. “So much of it is dependent on what’s happening in the catchment in terms of the farming, in terms of the loading into the reservoir of things like nutrients, fertiliser and also just sediment generally from run-off.”
The source said water companies were only now beginning to take a “long-term picture” approach to catchment management [working with landowners and farmers to prevent pollution] and improving water quality.
They warned that water chemistry issues could cause problems in other parts of the country, and the risk was growing due to ageing reservoirs and the impact of climate change.
On the Tunbridge Wells outage, they said: “It definitely could happen elsewhere.”
They added: “If you think about reservoirs, they’ve been used for decades. We don’t generally do any dredging of them anymore because actually from an environmental perspective that’s not necessarily a good thing to do.”
An ancient packhorse bridge is revealed by low water levels at Baitings Reservoir in Ripponden, West Yorkshire, in October. Rain from Storm Amy helped local reservoirs recover to some extent (Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty)
The source explained that the silt and sediment at the bottom of many reservoirs contained heavy metals, “forever chemicals” and “goodness knows what”.
They said: “You’ve got these reservoirs which have been used for decades, and they’ve just been having lots of sediment loading into them. You’ve got this bottom layer of the reservoir which is probably really sludgy, just contains a lot of nasty stuff.
“Then if you have a drought summer, your reservoir water level is going to drop lower and lower and lower, and you’re getting closer to that sludgy stuff at the bottom. So you are at risk of having to work with and treat lower quality water.
“That is probably going to happen a lot more frequently, where we are pushing these resources probably to their limit in terms of the reservoir capacity.”
The UK has not built a major reservoir for more than 30 years – but the Government has plans to fast track the construction of new ones. However, it is thought these will not be ready until well into the 2030s.
“The nature of where the world is going with climate change, with population increase, this critical infrastructure is going to come under a lot more pressure,” the source said.
Water quality infrastructure ‘not top priority’
However, the source added that investment in water quality infrastructure was no longer the industry’s top priority: “Public attention in recent years has swung from drinking water quality to sewer discharges. That’s where all the water companies are spending money, because they don’t want the bad PR. They’re spending all of their money on waste.”
In the case of Tunbridge Wells, South East Water is a water supplier but not a wastewater company, so it has not been prioritising the latter over the former. However, Mike Martin, the MP for Tunbridge Wells, shares the overall concern about underinvestment.
“The entire water network is underinvested,” the Liberal Democrat MP told The i Paper. “You could either build redundancy into your networks or you can make them cheap and efficient. Obviously if you run water companies as private ventures, their shareholders naturally demand efficient use of capital. They don’t want resilient water networks… that is the fundamental flaw in the model.
“If you’ve got no resilience built into your network, [when an incident happens] it falls over catastrophically, and then the costs are not borne by the shareholders of South East Water, the costs are borne by the businesses, the schools, the GPs.”
While many parts of the country can be supplied by an alternative treatment plant or reservoir in the event of a problem, Tunbridge Wells is completely reliant on the Pembury works.
The water industry source said: “That is a thing that the water company should have tried to anticipate in terms of their network resilience.” They added that with climate change, the ability to move water across region would become increasingly important.
Other vulnerable locations
It’s a problem South East Water is already grappling with in Haywards Heath, Sussex, where the local Ardingly reservoir is running low after a dry spring and summer. To stop Ardingly running out, the company is exploring the idea of a 13km overland pipeline to transfer water from Weir Wood Reservoir, owned by Southern Water.
Beyond the issues of infrastructure and investment, MPs think that what happened in Tunbridge Wells is a reflection of deeper issues in the industry.
Carmichael said that such outages could happen because “the culture within the water industry is one that doesn’t feel the need to provide accountability to the customers that they serve.”
Martin said: “The leadership of South East Water are complacent, hugely prone to an optimism bias, feel sorry for themselves.”
When the water cut started, the company did not even have pre-planned locations for distributing water bottles, he added. “They didn’t have a list of schools, nurseries, GPs. They didn’t know about the Tunbridge Wells kidney treatment centre. It’s unbelievable… their crisis management was literally non-existent.”
Meanwhile, the company had repeatedly issued conflicting information in its communications, including “inconsistent advice on how to prepare baby formula” during the boil notice, he said.
“They’ve got to change the leadership because they’re just not capable of fulfilling the functions they need to fulfil.”
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South East Water’s incident manager, Matthew Dean, said: “We know the past week has been incredibly frustrating for residents and businesses in the Tunbridge Wells area, and we are very sorry for the impact this situation has had, and continues to have.
“Our boiled water notice remains in place in the Tunbridge Wells area due to the water quality issues that caused the initial shutdown of our water treatment works in Pembury.
“We are testing the water regularly, it remains chemically safe and contains no bacterial contaminants. The water can be used for flushing toilets or showering, but crucially cannot be used for drinking or cooking without boiling and letting it cool first.”
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