Wednesday 23 November
A large number of Greg's constituents have been impacted by water outages over the past couple of weeks, with homes in many parts of the constituency receiving either no water, intermittent supplies or low pressure.
Today, Greg held a meeting with Douglas Whitfield, Director of Operations, who has been visiting a number of sites in and around the constituency that are integral to the local water supply.
The current situation has arisen because of power outages and flooding at three of the water treatment works which are interconnected – Bewl, Tonbridge and Groombridge.
Greg was informed that work is being undertaken to restore the network which should be completed by the morning of the 24th.
However, Greg has pushed for compensation for impacted customers and for improvements ot be made to the local network to bolster its resilience.
Greg said: "It is obviously unacceptable that the network should be exposed as having such poor resilience and I have asked for an urgent plan to be drawn up to correct this and shared with me. In addition, though it is no substitute for dependable supplies of fresh water, households affected need to be compensated for the disruption."
Thursday 24 November
Greg had a further conversation with South East Water this morning and was informed the system is back up and running. Greg reiterated the need for compensation and has asked for further meeting in order to discuss what steps will be taken to improve the network.
Monday 28 November
Customers hit by the Bewl Water Treatment Works outage a few weeks ago should expect ot have their compensation payments credited to their accounts this week.
There will be three tiers of payments, in this case £90, £120, and £150. The payment level for each groups relates to the severity of impact and South East Water will soon be writing to customers to let them know which payment level they will receive.
South East Water's priority list:
If you or anyone you know are vulnerable and have not received bottled water during outages, this may be because you are not recorded on the South East Water priority service yet, which provides deliveries of bottled water. To apply visit: www.southeastwater.co.uk/priority
