Speeches by Dollimore.

“Is that across the whole Southern Water area?”

“I have one final question. Through the course of a number of these situations that we have described, it has become apparent to me that perhaps Southern Water does not have a clear sense of exactly where all its pipes are and how often they are maintained. Are you confident that you have a clear sense of where all the …”

“The other aspect of this is that, when we have incidents like the flooding incidents I have described, the first agency that is on the scene is very often our local fire brigade. In the incident in Hastings I have just outlined, I watched firefighters carry people from their flooding homes to get them to safety. I have…”

“And to look at the compensation again.”

“We have talked today about outages. We have talked about sewage. I briefly want to talk about flooding, and when failures of Southern Water’s infrastructure have led to flooding. This has happened a number of times across your region. Sometimes it is a burst main, sometimes it is a blocked culvert. Many incidents have …”

“You have talked about citizen scientists. Many of us have local volunteer groups that have helped to expose the scale of the sewage dumping we have seen. They are volunteers. They go out and test the water. In my own patch, the Clean Water Action Group are currently crowdfunding themselves for additional tests to keep …”

“We have talked about the specifics of sewage incidents and the number of incidents doubling between 2022 and 2023, with sewage discharged 30,000 times. We have talked about the specifics of that and the measures you are taking to end that. I just want to take a step back and think about the impact that this has on our …”

“I have a quick question, because I am conscious of time, on the discussion about the availability of water, particularly in the south-east. You are saying that it is a particularly water-scarce area. There is less rainfall and there are plans to build one reservoir as a result. Is the problem not that no reservoirs hav…”

“By when? Could we look at an announcement in the next month or so?”

“Will you commit to review that decision and to look at giving compensation to the residents of Hastings for that outage?”

“That was under the last Government.”

“Turning now to compensation for these incidents when they happen, following the incident in 2024 in Hastings, no compensation has been paid to residents, including myself. In fact, we have had to pay our water bills for the days when we did not have any water. In the Southampton incident last year, around £30 per 12 ho…”

“Do you accept that that was a failure? Before 2017, you accept that it was a failure of Southern Water to not invest in fixing this infrastructure.”

“You have spoken about the need to invest in crumbling infrastructure, and decades of under-investment in that infrastructure. What I have here is, just in the Hastings area, a list of all of the pipes that your own documents define as “aged assets prone to failure”. I am sure that the pipe that burst would be one of th…”

“Why did you think that it was right, just two months after that incident, to take such a large bonus?”

“You need to take some responsibility. You came into Southern Water in 2020. You became chief executive in 2022. These incidents have all happened on your watch. Take the Hastings incident that you refer to, for example, where a member of your own team said that the Army nearly had to be called in. In 2007, Southern Wat…”

“We will come on to the specific incidents in a minute. If you accept that your handling of these incidents is not adequate and that they should have never happened in the first place, why did you choose to take a bonus of £160,000 in July last year?”

“Why have the lessons not been learned? In October 2023, in Rye, I fed the lessons directly into Southern Water. I then saw the same failures played out in Hastings, and we have heard about exactly the same happening in Southampton. Why does your company not learn the lessons each time?”

“What about the response when they did happen?”

“You would agree that Southern Water’s response to those three incidents was unacceptable.”