South East Water boss resigns after Kent’s winter water failures
Plus empty car parks, patriotic singalongs, sewage schemes and the rest of the week across Kent
We lead today with the resignation of South East Water chief executive David Hinton after months of supply failures across Kent and Sussex. We also cover the wider fallout from the county’s water crises, a BBC deep dive into life on Sheppey, council meetings across Kent, planning applications, and the latest mix of politics, infrastructure, culture and local absurdity from around the county.
South East Water boss resigns after Kent’s winter of water failure
David Hinton, the chief executive of South East Water, has resigned after months of supply failures left tens of thousands of customers across Kent and Sussex without reliable water.
The company announced on Friday that Hinton would step down as chief executive, though not immediately. He will remain in post over the summer while South East Water searches for a replacement, an oddly gentle exit for the man many customers now associate with dry taps and bottled water stations.
South East Water said Hinton had decided to go because “his position has become an increasing distraction from South East Water’s most important priority, which is to deliver a resilient water supply for its customers.”
It was an unusually candid line from a company that has spent much of the last few months being criticised for saying too little, too late.
Over the past few months, Hinton had become one of the most recognisable names in Kent, which is not a position anyone at a water company should particularly want.
In December, thousands of homes and businesses in and around Tunbridge Wells were left without water or with low pressure after problems at Pembury Water Treatment Works. Even once supplies returned, residents were told to boil their tap water before drinking it.
Ed Jennings
Weeks later, further outages hit areas including Maidstone, Canterbury and East Grinstead, with thousands more properties affected. Schools were forced to close, businesses lost trade, care homes had to rely on bottled water, and vulnerable residents were left dependent on a company whose emergency response increasingly looked unfit for the scale of the problem.
For South East Water, the failures have now reached the top of the organisation. Hinton’s resignation comes just a week after Chris Train resigned as the company’s chair following a damning report from MPs on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee.
The committee had called South East Water “devoid of proper leadership” and “riddled with cultural problems”, and said it had no confidence in the company’s leadership. Hinton had appeared before MPs twice, with the committee raising concerns about the company’s explanations, lack of accountability, and ability to learn from repeated failures.
Ed Jennings
The pressure on Hinton had been building for months. Helen Whately, MP for Faversham and Mid Kent, said on Friday that there was, “at last some accountability at South East Water.”
She said she had called for Hinton to go after “a completely inadequate emergency response” during the outages, adding that “vulnerable people were left without water, schools were forced to close, and livestock were ignored.”
Whately said this was not the first time South East Water had failed communities in Kent, pointing to previous problems in East Kent. She said Hinton had assured her he would fix the issues then, but “this time it was worse.”
Helen Grant, MP for Maidstone and Malling, also welcomed the resignation, saying it was “long overdue” after pressure from MPs across Kent and Sussex.
She said that “the priority now is for South East Water’s Board to appoint leadership with the vision and capability to deliver immediate operational improvements and a credible long-term investment plan.”
Katie Lam, the MP for Sevenoaks, said residents’ survey responses had been used directly as evidence in the parliamentary committee report that preceded Hinton’s resignation. Amid the Westminster heat around South East Water, much of the pressure has come from people documenting what happened to them when their taps stopped working.
The company now says its board remains focused on “accelerating targeted engineering works and making operational changes to improve the resilience of the supply network, increase water capacity and quality in high priority areas”.
Lisa Clement, South East Water’s interim independent non-executive chair, said: “The Board acknowledges and thanks Dave for his many years of loyal dedication and service to South East Water.”
That is the boardroom version. The customer version is less tidy.
Across Kent, the outages were not an abstract failure of corporate governance. They meant homes without water, shops and hospitality businesses losing Christmas trade, schools making calls on whether they could open, and councils trying to coordinate support when communication from the company fell short.
The fallout is not over either. Ofwat and the Drinking Water Inspectorate are also investigating parts of the company’s performance, while the regulator has been consulting on a £22m fine for separate supply failures between 2020 and 2023.
Whoever replaces Hinton inherits more than a hostile inbox. South East Water is facing angry customers, impatient MPs, wary councils, regulatory scrutiny, and serious questions about whether its infrastructure can cope with both existing demand and the government’s housebuilding targets across parts of Kent.
South East Water can now change the nameplate at the top. Kent still needs the harder part, which is a water company that can reliably provide water.
The big read
This week’s big read comes from the BBC, which uses an empty car park in Queenborough to tell a wider story about life on Sheppey, with council debt, new charges, struggling high streets, poor bus links, personal debt, and public services being stretched thin. It is a national story told through a very Kent example, and a useful reminder that local authority finances become a lot less abstract when they turn into parking meters, closed shops and buses that barely run.
Michael Buchanan and Adam Eley
Council matters
Meetings this week:
- Dover: Cabinet meets tonight (Monday) to discuss replacing their parking machines with new ones that don't take cash.
- Kent: Children, Young People and Education Cabinet Committee will discuss the creation of a new primary school in Paddock Wood on Tuesday.
- Medway: Regeneration, Culture and Environment Overview and Scutiny Committee will come together on Tuesday to debate the £46m purchase of nearly 800 properties from L&Q after the Conservatives called the decision in.
- Sevenoaks: Cabinet will discuss procurement for the redevelopment plans east of Sevenoaks High Street on Tuesday, behind closed doors.
- Gravesham: Planning Committee will decide on 150 new homes west of Meopham and changes to the plans for the new Cascades leisure centre on Wednesday.
- Ashford: Cabinet meets on Thursday to discuss planning enforcement on bank holidays and the restoration of heritage assets.
New planning applications:
- Dover: Conversion of an industrial unit in Sandwich into a music school.
Keeping track of Kent properly takes time, travel and a fair amount of patience. Kent Current only exists because some readers choose to support that work. An annual subscription costs £1.15 a week and helps keep it going.
In brief
🙏 Unsurprisingly, plans by the Reform administration at Kent County Council to introduce prayers and a singalong of the national anthem at council meetings have gone down about as well as you'd expect.
🚧 Kent has made two bids for the government's new Structures Fund for road repairs. They have asked for £40m to repair the Swanscombe Hole and £65m to repair Thanet Way.
🏗️ It's been a NIMBY bonanza over at KentOnline this week, with the outlet talking to residents in Canterbury who are outraged that flats will be built on an abandoned car park site. Meanwhile, they've found locals in Greatstone upset about 'Lego-like' homes being built. Finally, the website has been chatting to locals in Sutton at Home who are annoyed that a small block of flats will be built in their village.
🚛 Residents living near the Sevington Inland Border Facility are getting angry about bottles of urine and rubbish being left near the site.
💩 Southern Water has revealed a £42m sewage plan. To be clear, the plan is to reduce sewage spills and pollution incidents, even if events of the past few years might suggest otherwise.
🏥 Unison has said that staff at Darent Valley Hospital are struggling to maintain safe hygiene standards after it was left without water for over a week.
🚒 Parts of Bluewater were evacuated last week following an electrical fire in the EE store.
🏬 A Paddock Wood department store is set to close after 135 years.
🛍️ Meanwhile, The Forum in Sittingbourne is bucking the retail trend, with the shopping centre reaching full capacity one year after new owners took it on.
👩🎨 Tracey Emin has offered some thoughts on Reform losing in Margate.
🌊 Kent Wildlife Trust has demanded that more be done to protect chalk streams.
🐬 The 'dolphin' (Maidstone Council leader Stuart Jeffery tells us it's a porpoise) trapped in a lock in Allington has managed to escape.
⛳ Mini golf is being introduced at Ashford Designer Outlet.
🥳 Davina McCall is very enthusiastic about Tunbridge Wells.
👠 In words we never expected to be typing, a car bodyshop in Lydd helped make Kim Kardashian's Met Gala breastplate.
Property of the week
This week’s property is The Den in Eynsford, a three-bedroom house in a quiet close that looks fairly ordinary from the street, but reveals an A-frame interior that does something completely different. The layout is inverted, with all three bedrooms on the ground floor around a long entrance hall, including a main bedroom with an en suite, plus a family bathroom and a utility room. Upstairs is the real point of the place, with a 30-foot open-plan kitchen, dining, and living space that sits under the full height of the roof, with rooflights and a full-height glazed end wall looking straight out to the garden, plus wide doors onto a deck. It is also quietly loaded with modern kit, including underfloor heating, a heat pump, and automated heating, lighting and blinds, and it comes with parking for two cars and an EV charging point. If you have been scrolling past the same square footage in slightly different shades of beige, this is the antidote.
Events this week
🎛️ Wed 13 May - The Adam Buxton Band // Beloved podcaster and jingle auteur tours his first album. Dreamland, Margate. Tickets £30.
🕺 Thu 14 May - Bobak Champion: I'm Muslamic Don't Panik // British and Iranian identities collide with hip-hop, storytelling, dance, and comedy. Gulbebkian Theatre, Canterbury. Tickets £16.25.
🎛️ Sat 16 May - Kentronica // Mini-festival dedicated to experimental electronic music. Gulbenkian Arts Centre, Canterbury. Tickets from £10.
🚗 16 - 17 May - Faversham Festival of Transport // Vehicles of all shapes and sizes throughout the town centre. Faversham town centre. Free.
Footnotes
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