South East Water chiefs came under tough questioning in their latest appearance before a sceptical House of Commons Environment Food and Rural Affairs Committee last week in a further and lengthy session on water outtages which overran by almost an hour later than originally scheduled.

The evidence session with Chair Chris Train, CEO David Hinton and Caroline Sheridan, Non-Executive Director which began at 9.30 am was originally due to end in time for a separate evidence session starting at 11.00am. with Markus Rink, Chief Inspector at Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI), Chris Walters, CEO at Ofwat and Dr Mike Keil, CEO at Consumer Council for Water.

In the event, the first session ended at 11.42 am.

Photo: EFRA Committee Chair Alistair Mitchell

Chris Train and David Hinton appeared to be very much on the back foot throughout the session, under relentessly tough questioning and some particularly trenchant comments from Committee Chair Alistair Mitchell who opened the discussion by saying:

“David, last time you were here, we spoke about the outage at Tunbridge Wells at the end of November, into the early part of December. Let us just say the door had hardly swung shut behind you last time when there was another outage of some significance, in the same area, following Storm Goretti…..”

He went on to say that the Committee felt that the Drinking Water Inspectorate had given a very different picture to that which had been given by the water company’s CEO in the previous evidence session, setting the tone for questions from other members of the Committee during the course of the morning.

A sometimes hesitant and lacklustre performance from both David Hinton and Chris Train in response to detailed questioning from the formidably well-informed committee at times appeared to reveal a certain lack of awareness and understanding of how the failures in performance on a number of levels across an extended period were perceived by the public, regulators Ofwat and the DWI and local MPs for the South East Water region alike.

Referring to SEW’s root cause analysis of the difficulties the firm had experienced, Alastair Mitchell pointed out to Hinton that Ofwat had concluded that the firm had “fundamentally misunderstand the nature and purpose of root cause analysis” and were identifying “extreme weather,” “high demand” or “leakage” as causes.

In reply to his question whether Ofwat’s conclusion was that these were triggers, or “immediate causes", was a source of concern, David Hinton said:

“Of course, and we are still in that process with Ofwat and are further discussing that. We have put a lot of information into Ofwat about what we believe the root cause analysis is; we don’t think it is a single thing. That is where some difficulty between the parties is arising, but we will continue to discuss this with Ofwat as this process progresses.”

£600,000 to compensate business customers “is not going to touch the sides, is it?

Photo: South East Water CEO David Hinton

Asked about what the company was doing to compensate customers, the water company CEO said that when events occur, “we compensate them using the GSS payment system for both business and household customers.” With regard, to the actual losses incurred by businesses, David Hinton said that in the previous week had opened a fund with £600,000 initially put aside and claims would be assessed on a case-by-case..

The Committee Chair gave a dusty reply, saying that Mike Martin MP had written to the Committee to say he had conducted his own survey and 100 businesses had responded with a loss totalling something in the region of £1.2 million. “So £600,000 is not going to touch the sides, is it?”, Alastair Mitchell added.

The Chair was clearly underwhelmed by David Hinton’s further explanation that the process closes at the end of May and that the company would look at “sustaining a loss, insurability and a number of other factors when we pay the claim.”

“What I understand from that is that if you take the view that somebody should have insured against the risk of your company’s poor performance, then you would not expect to pay them compensation?”

He was likewise unimpressed by Hinton’s comment that he was “not fully up to speed with the rules of the scheme”, telling him:

“It is not about the rules of the scheme, Mr Hinton; it is about what you intend to do as a company.”

Following David Hinton’s ranking of 8 out of 10 for performance in a previous outtage, asked by the Chair how he would mark himself out of 10 for the outage in Tonbridge Wells, David Hinton declined to respond in those terms. Invited by the Chair to rank performance in terms of a word e.g. good, bad, indifferent David Hinton responded “disappointing.”

Chris Train “we accept that we failed in our primary duty”

Photo: South East Water Chair Chris Train 

Alastair Mitchell continued to press home with this line of questioning, asking Chris Train what mark he would give the company for its response to the two outages. The non-executive SEW chairman commented:

“I don’t think that is appropriate, as this is complex,” to which Mitchell replied:

“Were you told not to answer this question by somebody preparing you?” Going on to explain that “the purpose of asking you to give a mark is so that your customers have an understanding of how you see your performance on a scale.” he asked:

“Do you not think your customers deserve that degree of accountability from you?”

Chris Train:replied:

“That degree of accountability is that we accept that we failed in our primary duty. We could have done better with all the factors.”

He was immediately interrupted by the Chair saying:

“If I am a customer in Tunbridge Wells, what does that tell me? I think we know that you failed. It is surely important to them that you understand and you are prepared to explain the extent of the failure, and apparently you are not.”

Chris Train’s reply that “failure is failure, and we have failed” led Alastair Mitchell to ask why the company “reward failure within the company” with reference to David Hinton’s salary increase, bonus and performance payment. Chris Train was then further tripped up by the Committee Chair asking about the CEO’s £400,000 salary and the performance payment on top of that.

Told by Chris Train that the performance payment for this year had not been finalised but “Dave has indicated that he is not prepared to take a bonus this year,” the Chair swiftly asked:

“But were you prepared to give him one?”

He went on to say there had been a “history of systemic failing within this company since 2018 onwards”, and that during that time, salaries had gone up and bonuses had increased.

Chris Train replied that “Dave has surrendered his bonus, even if we were going to give it.”

Alastair Mitchell - “but you are still content that you do a good job and you should remain there”

A by now clearly exasperated Alastair Mitchell asked “As non-executive directors here, what effective difference do either of you make?”

He went on to point out that South East Water had been criticised by the Secretary of State, the Prime Minister and a whole range of different public and private bodies and that its own shareholders had expressed concerns, commenting “but you are still content that you do a good job and you should remain there.”

“I have taken long enough on this; I do not think we are going to make any further progress,” he added.

However, Alastair Mitchell’s colleagues on the Committee continued with this line of questioning.

Jenny Riddell-Carpenter MP returned to the attack, asking Chris Train “how bad would things have to get for a change in leadership at the very top.”

Chris Train:replied that board had given its commitment and its backing to “Dave and the executive team going forward” as “the right solution for delivering what is best for South East Water customers.”

Tim Roca MP then asked:

“I feel like we are wading through treacle here. You have not answered my colleague’s original question, which is, what would it take for a change in leadership? You have had an outage that affected tens of

thousands of people. Another outage that affected tens of thousands of people. A proposed fine because 286,000 customers have been failed, according to Ofwat. The Chair has pointed out that the Prime Minister

feels that what has happened is unacceptable. What more has to happen for Mr Hinton’s position to be untenable?”

Charlie Dewhirst MP - “The board is not doing its job: it is not delivering on governance”

Charlie Dewhirst MP was particularly blunt, commenting:

“As you have said, this is a failure of your basic objectives. It is failure after failure, excuse after excuse. The board is not doing its job: it is not delivering on governance, it is not delivering on accountability and, as my colleague Tim just said, you have lost the faith of your customers. The only way to rebuild that faith is to take action to change leadership. Why do you not see that that is a basic part of this?

“Any other company that has failed on its basic objectives, that has made mistake after mistake from 2018 onwards, and has failed to react to implement recommendations one time after another, would—yet here we are. I am frankly flabbergasted that nobody is accountable for the mess that the company is in.”

Chris Train said that as a board, it had to step back and “ask the questions that you are asking” to which Jenny Riddell-Carpenter replied:

“You might be asking the right questions, but you are coming up with the wrong answers.”

The discussion then moved on to foreseeability of the issues at Pembury in November 2025.

Photo credit Nigel Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0: Pembury Water Treatment Works 

David Hinton told the Committee there were signals in the early parts of November that the company should have reacted to and it should have done more in the early part of the period, saying:

“We should have then used different, more advanced problem-solving skills and remedied the situation quicker, and that would not have impacted customers.”

DWI had identified problems with coagulant dosing assets at Pembury over 10 years ago

Juliet Campbell MP said the DWI had identified problems with coagulant dosing assets at Pembury over 10 years ago and stated that it did not understand why SEW had not installed more modern systems.

David Hinton’s explanation that the system at Pembury changes the coagulant with the flow rate, that there were more advanced systems available and that Pembury was due to be upgraded in 2028 clearly failed to satisfy the Committee. He told the MPs that in the interim “while we were waiting for that upgrade that we should have been monitoring it more often, harder and more appropriately in the space between where we were and the upgrade itself.”

Asked about the timeframe for the upgrade, David Hinton said it was starting in 2028 and it would “take a number of years to do the whole plant; it is the sole treatment process for Tunbridge Wells so it cannot be taken offline.”

“It was identified as needing updating 10 years ago,” Juliet Campbell responded.

David Hinton set out a number of actions already taken at Pembury across the whole treatment works in terms of the process, including:

• installation of two filters;
• changed some of the washing philosophies on the filters;
• added more monitors into the system;
• an overall increase in jar testing;
• a complete overhaul of the risks faced at Pembury to take SEW to the point where a full refurbishment of the plant could be undertaken.

Alastair Mitchell - “ fundamental stuff that you have been warned about by regulators”

At this point Alastair Mitchell returned to the attack, saying:

“These are the things that the Drinking Water Inspectorate has been telling you for some time to do, are they not?”

In response to David Hinton’s comment that the DWI had audited SEW earlier in the year and that the company was on course to deliver the set of commitments by specific dates agreed with the DWI at that time, Alastair Mitchell proceeded to tie the water company CEO up in further knots, saying:

“The difficulty I have with this, David, is that last time you told us you could not talk to your customers at the time because you were leading from the front operationally. Leading from the front operationally, you still did not know at the beginning of January that these failings were there…..

“ This is fundamental stuff that you have been warned about by regulators, so you would surely have been looking for it, were you not? Yet still you are telling us you did not see it.”

David Hinton had to agree on this point, saying:

“We did not see this particular issue, and we should have seen it.“

Mitchell then took further issue with Chris Train, asking the SEW Chair how often he had visited Pembury - Mitchell appeared to be incredulous at the reply that he had visited the Pembury works on one occasion. commenting:

“But given all the previous warnings and the history of this plant, you have only visited it once. You have been a non-exec director since 2022….And chairman since then as well?”

Moving to questions around monitoring, maintenance and culture, Henry Tufnell MP referred to the DWI report which said that routine maintenance at Pembury was just not being undertaken. The MP listed a string of maintenance failures set out in the DWI report, including:

• seven of 13 scheduled site visits relating to the DAF stage—the dissolved air flotation filtration stage—were not started or completed between 9 and 25 November
• filters were not being washed adequately in the months before the incident

“You are not doing over half of what you are meant to be doing, “ he told Hinton.

The SEW CEO proceeded to respond with a detailed explanation:

“The maintenance that you are talking about is routine daily maintenance that the individual technicians on site perform. That will never be totally 100% because they react to what is happening on the plant as well, and they were judged on that risk assessment. Seven out of 13 is not good enough. What this has shown to us as an executive team is that the teams are too reactive and are not spending enough time on the routine tasks.

“The Kent and Sussex area, and particularly the Kent area, needs to have all the treatment works running at all times: it is a very tight supplydemand balance. That has generated a reactive culture that we really need to resolve. This is not the choice of the individuals; it is the pressure that we put on it. That is one of the reasons we have increased the operational staff by 100 people and put in a planned maintenance team that is dedicated to doing the planned maintenance so the operators can operate.

Henry Tufnell pointed out that the DWI had also set out that there was not enough monitoring going on at the Pembury works, particularly around optimising the coagulation process.

There was no continuous temperature monitoring, and the critical treatment parameters—raw water conductivity, coagulant flow, aluminium concentrations—were not being monitored.

David Hinton – “we were not thinking enough about the risk”

Photo: Drinking Water Inspectorate Chief Inspector Marcus Rink

Asked whether he accepted DWI Inspector Marcus Rink’s evidence to the Committee which said that SEW were effectively flying blind in the lead-up to the event, David Hinton commented:

“I accept that we were not recording absolutely what we should have been recording. We were reliant on the fact that the works had run stable for so long with the parameters we were measuring that we did not think enough about the risk.

“Risk has been a big learning from both the independent review and the DWI review. One of the big parts of the transformation is to have risk embedded right down to a site level so we have complete visibility throughout the business. The water industry historically manages risk at a site level; that allows the operators to manage the risk, and we want more of that visibility. We are deeply embedding risk right across the

organisation so we can see when these issues begin: when issues around maintenance start to arise, when issues around water quality performance start to arise.”

Henry Tufnell pointed out that the DWI had found that SEW did not carry out any jar testing in October, despite there being a requirement under regulatory notice to do so, and that the original coagulant should have worked had the optimisation process been followed.

“There seems to be a complete lack of any acceptance that risks need to be managed, they need to work; you are not even complying under your regulatory notices in respect to the lead-up to this event.” he suggested.

Chris Train intervened, saying part of SEW’s transformation plan is to get a more proactive rather than reactive view of the situations on site so that it could proactively manage better.

“We have essentially become a very responsive organisation rather than a proactive organisation,” he acnowledged.

Caroline Sheridan - “Unfortunately I cannot ... say it will not happen again”

At this point in the discussion Alastair Mitchell switched his attention to Caroline Sheridan, Non-Executive Director, SEW, saying:

“Just over a year, so some of this was happening on your watch?...But you were still allowed to mark your own homework.”

Caroline Sheridan gave a robust response, referring to her experience in asset management and engineering, plus water sector and safety-critical environments:

“I have been meeting with the team to discuss asset management and to discuss how we look after and maintain our assets.

“One of the key findings from this report is around the visibility of some of the risks. That is something that we absolutely need to improve so that we can see the risks on single points of failure such as Pembury and can review that we are taking the right action, as has been recommended in this report and the DWI report, and have direct visibility that that is happening so that we can prevent incidents such as Pembury happeningagain.”

Asked by Mitchell “Can you sit there today and tell us that it will not happen again?” she gave a straighforward response:

“Unfortunately I cannot sit here today and say it will not happen again.”

She went on to explain:

“There is no single root cause... it is fragility across the system. Pembury fundamentally operates a chemical process; layers of protection have been gradually eroding and we did not have sight of the system as a whole….

“There has been a breakdown in some of the layers of risk reporting and the approach to report risk at a site-by-site level, which is quite normal within the water sector, but we need to be much better at analysing this and looking at our single points of failure.”

 Chris Train - “I am fully aware that we made a lot of mistakes on communications” 

The Committee then moved on to questioning in relation to incident preparations and communications – where once again, the SEW Chiefs’ responses failed to elicit strong approval from the Committee.

Josh Newbury said:

“It seems to me that whether it is crisis comms or support for vulnerable customers, the preparation that you as South East Water deemed to be adequate does not stack up against either the practices of pretty much the whole of the rest of the industry or the expectations of your customers.,,

“The DWI said that you did not provide it with what it was looking for on the communications front, and that what you sent it was wholly inadequate.”

David Hinton replied:

“I am afraid I do not know the detail of that particular request or our response, but we are absolutely committed to making sure those things are in place and that emergency plans are in place, and that is very much a part of our response going forward.”

“Not a good move to seek an injunction against criticism of your organisation”

The issue of David Hinton continuing as CEO came up several times during the course of the session – likewise the water company’s failed attempt to obtain an injunction in the High Court in March following its claim for judicial review, challenging Ofwat’s decisions to propose an enforcement order and financial penalty and to publish notice of the proposals. They also applied for an interim injunction to prevent publication of the proposals pending determination of the claim.

Mr. Justice Chamberlain said in his final judgement on 2nd March:

“Any harm that would be caused to SEW in the scenario where interim relief is refused and the claim later succeeds is very firmly outweighed by the harm that would be caused to potential and existing lenders and investors, customers and the public interest generally in the scenario where interim relief is granted and the claim otherwise fails.

“On no view does SEW’s claim and evidence establish the “pressing grounds” or “most compelling reasons” needed to justify the grant of interim relief to restrain publication of a regulatory decision which (given its provisional findings) Ofwat is under a statutory duty to publish.”

When the EFRA Chair suggested to the two non-executive Directors that they could not be happy with what they had heard about communication with customers, and safeguards for customers, Chris Train commented:

“I am fully aware that we made a lot of mistakes on communications.” 

Asked whether with hindsight, they thought they had made the right call and whether knowing what they knew, they would nonetheless continue to give confidence to their chief executive, Chris Train simply replied: “yes.”

Jenny Riddell-Carpenter MP suggested to David Hinton that trust had not improved and it was in fact worse. Likewise, communications had not improved and were worse, "purely on the fact that in March 2026, you sought to get an injunction against Ofwat’s investigation and report on you."

“Do you recognise that to seek to challenge that knowledge and subsequently to seek an injunction to stop the report coming out - a report that, by the way, does not even refer to what we are talking about today but refers to issues between 2020 and 2023— does nothing to build trust with your customers? It does the complete opposite,” she continued.

David Hinton explained that it was a board decision to seek the injunction as the board felt that “more dialogue was to be had with Ofwat on a number of issues in its investigation decision; we did not feel that we had exhausted the process.”

“We wanted to make sure that Ofwat’s decision, which ultimately goes in the public domain and impacts trust, would properly reflect the dialogue that we would like to have had with Ofwat at the time…..we made that decision in good faith. We made it in an attempt to try to complete the dialogue with Ofwat before it was published.”

In response to David Hinton’s comment that he did not know whether communications were in the room when the decision was made, Jenny Riddell-Carpenter commented:

“I would imagine they were not in the room because I cannot imagine that anyone would advise you that it would be a good move to seek an injunction against criticism of your organisation so that the public could not see it. If you wanted to build trust with your customer base and to fulfil your social contract, you would be confident having that discussion in public with Ofwat, and to say, “We do not agree with this, we have questions on this, we have invested in this.” You would have that discussion publicly, you would not seek to have an injunction.”

David Hinton - “someone once described South East Water as a good company with a really big interruptions problem”

Questioning the CEO on David Hinton on supply interruption targets, she was scathing in response to his comment that “someone once described South East Water as a good company with a really big interruptions problem.”

Jenny Riddell-Carpenter said: “That is like saying that BA are a really good airline but the planes cannot get off the ground.”

Adding that “the operation was a success, but the patient died,” Alastair Mitchell referred to the judge’s comments in relation to the injunction. Describing them as “quite remarkable”, he said:

“The judge said that blocking publication to protect a company reputation among credit rating agencies was “objectionable in principle” and demonstrated “real incoherence” as investors are unlikely to be content to rely on a credit rating “based on materially incomplete information.” He goes on to say that misleading credit rating agencies could cause investors to enter into contracts that they would not otherwise have entered into.”

Alastair Mitchell asked Chris Train:

“When I asked you about the role of the non-executive director at the top, you spoke about the importance of governance. Is this the sort of governance that you as a company feel comfortable with?”

Chris Train explained: “We had absolutely no intention of misleading anybody in terms of the nature of the organisation.”

The Committee Chair continued with this line of questioning, asking:

“You could see how it would be misleading to anyone who was a prospective investor, could you not?” - Chris Train replied: “I could, yes.”

Alastair Mitchell - we may need to "follow this further upstream and see where the shareholders and owners are involved"

Alastair Mitchell concluded this part of the evidence session by saying:

“I will not pretend that I feel that the Committee yet has all the answers that I feel it needs to have. It may be that we need to follow this further upstream and see where the shareholders and owners are involved in all this, because what we have here is something that is wholly unsatisfactory for the customers, it is clearly unsatisfactory for the regulators, and I am still no clearer about who thinks that it is satisfactory. “

Click here to listen to the first evidence session on 14 April 2026

Click here to download the transcript of the first evidence session on 14 April 2026