On Friday (27th October) Andrew Griffith MP and Jeremy Quin MP met with Lawrence Gosden, Southern Water’s Chief Executive to tour Hardham Water Supply Works. Hardham was the source of the water outage affecting thousands of local residents earlier in the year and both MPs wanted reassurance that work has been done and is ongoing to try avoid any repetition of a similar incident.
After a thorough review the root cause of the outage was identified by Southern Water and a revised monitoring and replacement regime is now operating. Given the automatic shut-downs that take place whenever a failure takes place that could impact the quality of drinking water every part of the process needs to be maintained to a very high standard.
Jeremy Quin said, “The U.K. shares with only 4 other countries the accolade of having the highest quality drinking water in the world and these standards must be maintained along with the automatic shutdowns to protect them. I am pleased that the root cause of the outage has been identified and measures have been put in place to avoid a repeat and to better respond to any future incident.”
“It was also good to get an update from Southern Water on the progress they are making on expanding the monitoring and reducing the impact of storm overflows. They are 98 per cent of the way there on monitoring and will shortly meet the Government's requirement of 100 per cent monitoring. Water quality is higher than it has been since the Industrial Revolution but there is still more that must be done and an investment plan is underway."
Andrew Griffith said, “Losing water supply during a heatwave was a big deal for residents and came on top of the very long-standing issues with storm discharges into our rivers. In response to tough new environment laws the government has passed, the CEO explained how Southern Waters shareholders have been forced to put money into the business to carry out the necessary investment to raise standards. That’s quite right and I look forward to improvements being made.”
