South East Water Chair Resigns After No-Confidence Report

The independent nonexecutive chair of South East Water, Chris Train, resigned from the board effective immediately on Thursday, following a parliamentary committee report that expressed no confidence in the company's leadership over repeated water supply outages in Kent and Sussex.

Train's departure, announced in a company statement, was described as mutually agreed to enable new independent board leadership during a period of transformative change. Lisa Clement has been appointed as interim independent nonexecutive chair. The company apologized to affected customers for operational failures that eroded public trust and pledged to double investment in its water supply network over the next five years.

The outages, occurring between November and January, left thousands of customers without tap water, preventing them from showering or flushing toilets. Schools, GP surgeries, and care homes were among those impacted. The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Efra) Committee, in a report published Friday, attributed the disruptions to poor maintenance of infrastructure, failure to monitor critical risks, inadequate investment in resilience, and a tendency to blame external factors...