Outages prompt calls for reform of water companies

Dependable water systems are one of the core foundations upon which societies are built.

- HARRY COCKBURN

From immense Roman aqueducts to grand Victorian sewers, plumbing has underpinned public health, enabled cities to grow, and pushed once-deadly diseases like cholera and typhoid to the margins. Yet in the UK today, this foundation is cracking – with widespread outages, sewage-choked rivers, and water companies struggling to deliver the very basics they were created to guarantee.

Nearly 2,000 years after Pliny the Elder wrote of the Roman plumbing system that “there has never been anything more remarkable in the whole world”, people in Britain would be hard-pressed to agree. In recent weeks, tens of thousands of people living in the southeast of England have seen first hand what the breakdown of water provision looks like.

“We couldn’t wash or shower, we couldn’t flush the toilet for two days. It was full of excrement. I had to plunge it to clean it all up. It was disgusting really,” Tunbridge Wells resident David Ayre told The Independent, while queuing for bottled water at the town’s rugby club.

This week alone, South East Water outages meant 30,000 properties were without water in parts of Kent and East Sussex. This followed another major halt to the water supplies in the area, which began in November and lasted into December, affecting around 24,000 homes. Local MP Mike Martin, a Liberal Democrat, told The Independent the scale of the problem meant South East Water had “lost all credibility”.