Wealden Councillors Call For Lower Housing Targets After Water Outages

Wealden councillors have unanimously called for lower housing targets in light of the recent water outages in parts of the district. 

On Wednesday (June 28), Wealden District Council held an extraordinary meeting in the wake of a mass outage, which hit around 6,000 South East Water customers for several days.

The incident was the second mass water outage to take place within the district in the last year, with many of the same customers having been hit previously in the period leading up to Christmas 2022.

The meeting had been called by a cross-party group of councillors, who put forward a single motion for debate.

This motion was introduced by Independent councillor David White (Hellingly), who said:

“There are two bodies that are responsible for where we are today. One is Ofwat and one is the government. Yes, South East Water fails to have a resilient plan in place, they know the housing growth is there, they know it should be coming and to say that they haven’t adequately provided is a gross admission of failure that should be penalised. 

“[But] Ofwat has previously looked into the failures of South East Water. It has drawn up plans.

"Clearly, those have failed. I think they need to be taken to task to make sure they have a much more resilient approach to the regulation of South East Water and indeed all other utility suppliers, because they are failing the public.

“But there is still, in my view, the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room is that water is a limited resource and the government is imposing unreasonable demands in terms of imposing additional housing numbers at a time when we have failing infrastructure.”

In full, the motion called on Liberal Democrat council leader James Partridge (who was not present for the debate) and chief executive Trevor Scott to write to South East Water asking for a full explanation of the recent failures and the full details of the steps being taken to address it. 

It also called on Cllr Partridge and Mr Scott to write to both the water regulator Ofwat and the government, setting out the council’s concerns and asking for a reduction in housing targets “until there is a long term solution to the water shortage.”

While the motion was unanimously passed, there was strong debate (briefly interrupted by a fire alarm) about the causes of the outage and whether the efforts proposed in the motion would do enough to prevent a repeat in future. 

Conservative councillors also took the opportunity to criticise the Green/Lib Dem administration’s response to the water outages, arguing the council should have stood up an emergency response far sooner than it did.  They pointed to their own response to the Christmas outages and said the council should have taken stronger steps to hold South East Water to account.

Cllr Ann Newton, leader of the Conservative group also took issue with the call for lower housing numbers within the motion. She said:

“Writing to the minister of housing, communities and local government not only dilutes the fact that this problem is solely and very clearly down to South East Water but also highlights to Mr Gove that we are once again being critical of housing numbers and putting him one step closer to taking our planning powers away.

“South East Water must solely be held to account, as must Ofwat for their lack of effective regulation.”

Responding to criticism from Conservatives, Cllr Kelvin Williams, Liberal Democrat cabinet member for public health and asset management, said:

“The new, current council’s response to the incident followed the procedures which the previous council had actually followed.

“Certainly, we were constantly pressing for what was necessary and how we could assist. It was consistently rebuffed by South East Water. To try and compare the incident that happened prior to Christmas to the one that happened recently is political shenanigans basically.”

The debate also saw an amendment tabled by the council’s Labour group, which called on the council to support South East Water going into public ownership. 

Proposing the amendment, Cllr Daniel Manvell (Uckfield North, Lab) said:

“The current system is not working. It is not working for our residents, it is not working for our waterways and it is not working for our environment. 

“Our residents know that this is not just a South East Water issue, it is systemic. We need change and I think we need to support that change today.”

The amendment failed to win the support of the council and was not passed.