Water supplies restored after thousands in Kent faced issues over weekend
7,000 homes have been affected over the last couple of days after a failure at Pembury treatment works
Last updated 20th Jul 2026
Thousands of people in Kent have had water supplies restored after issues over the weekend, South East Water (SEW) has said.
The company said on Saturday that 7,000 properties around the Tunbridge Wells area faced supply issues including low pressure, intermittent supply or no water after an “instrument failure” at a nearby treatment works.
On Sunday evening, SEW said supplies had been restored to customers in the Tunbridge Wells and Pembury areas.
SEW incident manager Steve Benton said: “We are genuinely sorry to all customers in the affected areas who have been experiencing low pressure, intermittent supply, or no water over the weekend.
“This would not normally impact customer supplies, but coupled with the extremely high demand for water during the extended heatwave, it caused our drinking water storage levels to fall to very low levels.
“This is not the service we aim to provide, and is not the service our customers deserve.”
Bottled water stations were set up by the company over the weekend in the affected areas.
Earlier this week, the water company was ordered to pay £30.5 million after investigations by industry watchdog Ofwat following previous supply interruptions affecting hundreds of thousands of households across Kent and Sussex.
Ofwat said the redress package concludes three investigations into the supplier and includes a previously proposed £22 million fine for water supply failures between 2020 and 2023, which impacted more than 286,000 people.
The regulator launched a second probe at the start of this year after further supply interruptions in Tunbridge Wells and across Kent and Sussex between November and January, which left up to 70,000 homes without water.
The third investigation followed the downgrading of SEW’s credit rating by Moody’s in May, which meant the firm was in breach of its licence condition.
SEW warned in its annual report this week that it needed to secure fresh financing to stay afloat after taking a £55 million hit from outages over the winter.
The water supplier with around 2.3 million customers in the South East said it was in discussions with lenders to agree a new loan facility.
It has enough cash to keep going until July 2027 but flagged that “shortly after” it will need to get more financing.