Southern Water keeps being fined for polluting Kent. Has anything actually changed?
Plus 122 councillor complaints, a bleak housing picture, recycled clothing in potholes and more from across Kent
Southern Water has now been fined £9.5m for pollution offences in Kent this year, with more cases still to come. We look at whether the company has actually improved, alongside 122 complaints against Kent county councillors, grim housebuilding figures, recycled clothing in potholes and the strange story behind Kent Cricket’s promotion.
Catch Up
Musician Rob Shepherd and the late Chris Broderick spent years adapting Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck for a major Korean theatre company. Four years after Broderick’s death, their musical is finally opening in London as Franz & Marie. Steven spoke to Shepherd about their collaboration, the show’s unlikely journey from Medway to Seoul and what it means to bring it back without his friend.
Steven Keevil
Back in Kent, two bridges have finally opened in Blean, doubling the woodland available to the county’s bison. The £1m structures solve the awkward problem created by British law treating the animals as dangerous wildlife: people travel over them while the bison, after some initial suspicion, pass underneath. We examined why an experiment in letting nature manage itself has required 43km of fencing and some surprisingly elaborate infrastructure.
More seriously, the Grand Burstin remains closed following the major fire at the Folkestone hotel. Engineers believe part of the building could collapse, 90 neighbouring flats remain evacuated and nobody knows whether it will reopen. We looked at what happens next and why a building can be both a landmark and a planning cautionary tale.
Southern Water keeps being fined for polluting Kent. Has anything actually changed?
Southern Water was fined another £2.4m last week for polluting waterways around Faversham and Whitstable. Under normal circumstances, that would qualify as quite a substantial piece of news. Unfortunately for anyone trying to keep track of Southern Water's court appearances, it was merely the latest.
In July, the company was fined £7.1m for separate pollution incidents around Thanet. In December, it is due back in court again over unrelated cases involving Herne Bay, where 49 homes and businesses were flooded with sewage, and another incident near Canterbury. This means Southern Water has already received £9.5m in Kent pollution fines this year, with more cases still to come.
The latest case covered five offences between 2019 and 2021, including untreated sewage entering Faversham Creek, diesel leaking from Swalecliffe wastewater treatment works into Swalecliffe Brook and the sea, and more untreated sewage escaping from a pumping station into the same brook.
After one incident in August 2021, Environment Agency investigators found around 70 dead fish, including eels. Further pollution followed later that month, with Canterbury City Council eventually putting up signs at Tankerton and Herne Bay beaches warning people not to swim for nearly a week.
For all of that, Southern Water was fined £2,416,666.67, because apparently even multi-million-pound sewage fines occasionally require 67p of precision.
It would be easy enough to add this to the substantial pile of stories about water companies putting things into rivers and seas that ideally would not be there. But something slightly stranger is going on. Southern Water is being sentenced in 2026 for incidents that happened between five and seven years ago.
The £7.1m fine imposed in July also related to incidents between 2019 and 2021. They included around 10 million litres of sewage being discharged for almost 24 hours in July 2019, and at least 16 million litres being released over two days in another incident.
That prosecution came almost exactly five years after Southern Water was fined a record £90m for nearly 7,000 illegal sewage discharges across Kent, Sussex and Hampshire. Those offences happened between 2010 and 2015.
So while Southern Water appears to be having a particularly eventful year in the courts, much of what is currently being punished actually belongs to earlier versions of the company. Which raises a more useful question than whether Southern Water was bad at sewage in 2019.
Is it any better now?
Southern Water would argue that it is. Earlier this year, water regulator Ofwat confirmed that the company had finally completed more than 1,000 actions across 293 wastewater treatment works required following an investigation that began nearly a decade ago.
That process resulted in £126m in penalties and customer redress and required Southern Water to review compliance across all its wastewater treatment works, return 118 sites to compliance and improve how it monitors and reports spills.
At Swalecliffe, one of the locations at the centre of last week's court case, the company is now carrying out an estimated £90m programme of improvements. A replacement sea outfall was installed in 2024, and Southern Water says there was only one storm overflow release through it between July 2024 and the end of September last year. More work is planned through to 2031.
All of which would suggest that judging Southern Water in 2026 entirely by what it did in 2019 might be slightly unfair.
Unfortunately for Southern Water, the more recent figures are not exactly sparkling either.
The Environment Agency's latest full assessment gave the company two stars out of four for its environmental performance, meaning it still 'requires improvement.' In 2024, Southern Water recorded 269 sewage pollution incidents, when it needed 81 or fewer to receive the Environment Agency's green rating.
More seriously, 15 incidents were significant or major. Southern Water, Thames Water and Yorkshire Water between them accounted for 81% of all serious water company pollution incidents in England that year.
And those figures aren't just describing another historic mess slowly working its way through the courts. Over the past year, the Environment Agency has carried out more than 730 checks on Southern Water sites, and only 68% were found to be compliant with their permits. Those inspections generated more than 400 improvement actions.
So it would be unfair to judge Southern Water today entirely by the sewage it released seven years ago. It would perhaps be equally optimistic to conclude that everything has therefore been sorted.
There has been genuine improvement in parts of the system. Southern Water is spending billions on its network, individual sites such as Swalecliffe are receiving substantial upgrades, and regulators have confirmed that work ordered after previous investigations has actually been completed.
But even that comes with an asterisk. When Ofwat confirmed in February that Southern Water had finally completed all actions arising from its 2019 investigation, it also decided the company still needed to do more to comply with its wider wastewater obligations.
It is difficult to think of a better illustration of the water industry's peculiar regulatory time warp. Southern Water finishes one set of improvements required because of failures uncovered years ago, while regulators identify another set of improvements it still needs to make, and the courts sentence it for a different set of failures from somewhere in between.
The fines themselves are not supposed to disappear into customer bills. The Environment Agency says companies cannot raise prices to recover them, so they should instead reduce money available for profits, dividends and executive bonuses.
Perhaps this is what progress in the English water industry now looks like, spending tens of millions fixing a sewage system while simultaneously paying millions for what the old one did.
Whether the new one works any better will probably become apparent considerably sooner than the courts get around to telling us.
In brief
🗄️ 122 formal complaints have been made against councillors at Kent County Council since the local elections in May 2025.
🏘️ Only Dover is meeting its housing target in Kent, with Sevenoaks delivering just 25% of the homes required.
💉 Scientists have figured out what made this year's meningitis outbreak in Kent so severe.
🏥 A new same-day emergency care unit has opened at Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Hospital in Margate.
Maidstone Borough Council is experimenting with filling potholes in parks with recycled clothing.
🌱 Three new pocket parks have opened in Maidstone. Reviews on social media have been, to put it mildly, mixed.
🏏 Inside the season of faith healer and social media bans that led to Kent Cricket securing an unlikely promotion.
🍞 A bakery will replace a former bowls club in Gravesend.
🍷 The Malta Inn near Aylesford is set to reopen under the new ownership of Elite Pubs, who operate several excellent venues in the south west of the county.
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Council matters
Meetings this week
- Gravesham: Cabinet meets tonight (Monday) to discuss performance, Cygnet Leisure Centre, and youth issues.
- Dover: Council meets on Wednesday to debate the cost of local government reorganisation, planning changes, and more.
- Maidstone: Council will debate housebuilding figures and non-attendance at council meetings. Presumably for councillors, not the public.
- Maidstone: Council gets together on Wednesday to discuss planning, licensing, local government reorganisation, and more.
- Tunbridge Wells: Planning Committee will decide on 130 new homes between Tonbridge and Paddock Wood.
- Kent: Cabinet will discuss budget monitoring on Thursday.
New planning applications
- Ashford: Mixed-use development including Coffee Fellows' first UK branch and a tyre shop.
- Medway: New care home on former St John Fisher school land in Chatham.
Property of the week
Welcome to Chart House in Great Chart, where £1.875 million buys enough house that the floorplan includes both a wine store and a dog cubby, presumably because everyone needs their own space. The Grade II listed main house has six bedrooms, five bathrooms, three reception rooms, and a 37ft kitchen, while the 1.3 acres outside include an outdoor kitchen, gym, and triple garage. There is then an entire two-bedroom cottage left over, which has been earning around £25,000 a year, because apparently the main house wasn't quite enough property. Remarkably, someone has also tried to make this whole operation vaguely responsible, with 21 solar panels, bespoke double glazing and a biomass heating system that currently makes heating the main house and cottage effectively cost-neutral. For £1.875 million, you are essentially buying a very small village with unusually good energy management.
Events
🎸 Mon 28 Sep - The Lemonheads // Cult US alternative rock band. Dreamland, Margate. Tickets £40.
📖 Tue 29 Sep - Enter the Castle with Jon Ronson // Acclaimed author tours his first book in 11 years. Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury. Tickets from £34.
🎤 Wed 30 Sep - Maisie Adam: Whatsherface // Recent Taskmaster winner tours brand new show. Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury. Tickets £28.
📚 1 - 11 Oct - Maidstone LitFest // Author talks, workshops and family events, with guests including Iain Dale, Sian Williams, Dan Abnett, Milly Johnson, Adele Parks and Louise Candlish. Various venues, Maidstone. Tickets from £5.
🎤 Fri 2 Oct - Rory Bremner & Guests // Satirical impressionist headlines a night of comedy, preceded by two guest comedians. Trinity Theatre, Tunbridge Wells. Tickets £33.
🍎 2 - 4 Oct - Broadstairs Autumn Food Festival // Around 100 food and drink stalls alongside live music and children’s activities. Victoria Gardens, Broadstairs. Free.
🎸 Sun 4 Oct - Frances of Delirium // Power pop from Luxembourg. Ramsgate Music Hall. Tickets £12.50.
👻 Sun 4 Oct - Things I Took from the Dark as told by Reece Shearsmith // Inside No. 9 co-creator explores the macabre objects, uncanny stories and childhood experiences that have influenced his work. Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury. Tickets from £34.
Footnotes
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