We are on our third major water outage in a year. Thousands of homes and businesses have gone without water for days on end.
Farmers in Kent have been told they need to reduce the amount of water they use.
Meanwhile, truckloads of water are being used to wash solar panels at the Cleve Hill Solar Park in Graveney. This cannot make sense!
I keep asking Government Ministers how they plan to supply the thousands of extra homes in the pipeline for Kent - when there is clearly not enough water for current residents. They will not give me a straight answer.
Only last week I asked the Water Minister again about this in Parliament. She answered my question saying that the Government is looking into the agreement between South East Water and Southern Water about their bulk supply arrangement, exploring new building standards that will use less water and supplying businesses with non-drinking water for those who don’t need it.
These are all good things to do, but they are not going to address the chronic shortage of water for current homes, let alone the thousands more houses which are coming down the track.
At the recent Heathlands consultation last month, I challenged both Homes England and Maidstone Borough Council about building an extra 5,000 houses in an area with so little water it has be tankered in on a regular basis. They assured me that at the time Maidstone were consulting on their local plan, South East Water raised no concerns about water supply.
Swale Borough Council are currently starting work on their new local plan. I have contacted South East Water to ask if there is enough water to supply the extra houses which will be in that plan. They got back to me to say,
“We are working with Swale Borough Council to fully understand their latest housing growth forecasts and how they align with our assumptions.”
Meanwhile Swale Borough Councillors, Cllr Julien Speed and Cllr Lloyd Bowen have submitted a motion to Swale Borough Council requiring both South East Water and Southern Water to explain how they plan to supply the 17,875 new houses in the new Swale Local Plan.
The Secretary of State for Housing is due to decide in the next couple of months whether to approve 8,400 houses at Highsted Park. The Government needs to take its fingers out of its ears. There is not enough water in Kent. We need urgent action - and we need a halt to large-scale house building until this is sorted out.
