‘These water companies have got a damn nerve’: anger in England as 58,000 homes lose supply while bills surge
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Southern Water customers’ taps ran dry or lost pressure after a fault at one of its supply works. “It feels awful,” said Samantha Hargreaves as she trundled her bottle-laden trolley past queues of cars waiting for drinking water in an Asda car park. It was the second year in a row that her water supply had been cut off shortly before Christmas, and she was loading up her car with extra bottles to give to less mobile neighbours.
![[Ajit Niranjan]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2023/09/18/Ajit_Niranjan.png?width=75&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
“There’s quite a few of us who are struggling,” said Hargreaves, a 31-year-old community healthcare assistant. Hargreaves is one of tens of thousands of people supplied by Southern Water in and around Southampton whose taps ran dry or lost pressure on Wednesday. The continuing outage, which hit 58,000 households in Hampshire after a fault at a supply works, happened as the industry regulator, Ofwat, announced the region’s bills will rise by more than anywhere else in England.
![[Roger Brown standing in a car park with a trolley and shopping bags]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/dbcb217af92e02f38e1c14ae843c4bd15af88bb0/0_433_6501_3901/master/6501.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
“I’m not worried about this,” said Roger Brown, 67, pointing to the palettes of bottled water being unloaded in the car park as part of Southern’s efforts to stem the crisis. “I’m more annoyed my water bills are going to go up.”. Water bills across England and Wales will rise over the next five years by an average of 36%, but customers of Southern Water will have their bills shoot up by 53%. The money, Ofwat says, is to be invested in projects that cut spills during storm overflows – a key cause of the raw sewage dumps that have fouled England’s waterways – as well as in meeting stricter environment rules and building new reservoirs to manage drought. Ofwat said the proportion of customers that get help with their bills will more than double from 4% to 9%.
![[Sophie Orton sitting in her white car]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/77a6d18e0dbf8e75404dd8e29308e25bf9a41fc5/0_405_6067_3640/master/6067.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
