Southern Water's Your Water Matters event at Stade Hall in Hastings Old Town on October 12 2023.

Southern Water's Your Water Matters event at Stade Hall in Hastings Old Town on October 12 2023. Katy Taylor, Chief Customer Officer, explains more.

Transcript

00:00 We're really pleased to be here today to speak to customers, community stakeholders in the

00:09 Hastings area, really just to talk about some of the issues and the challenges we've had

00:13 locally, to hear from our customers, to understand what the problems are that they're experiencing

00:17 and to talk about some of the great work that Southern Water does.

00:20 So we've got our affordability team to help customers who may be struggling with their

00:23 bills, we've got our storm overflows team who are looking at how we can reduce the number

00:27 of times our storm overflows spill into the sea, and then also our teams that are going

00:31 to talk about the investment that's coming both in the next two years of this regulatory

00:35 period and also in the next five years.

00:37 It's massively important for Southern Water to engage with our residents and our communities.

00:41 And essentially Southern Water only exists to serve our customers, we're only here to

00:45 provide clean water and take that waste water away.

00:49 So it's really important we hear what's frustrating our customers, what they don't understand,

00:53 where perhaps we're not communicating well enough, so that we can get better and we can

00:56 improve.

00:57 We also have spoken to our customers a lot about what is it that they want to see, what

01:00 improvements do they want to see in their environment and in their communities.

01:04 And so that's what we've put into our plan for the next regulatory period and we're really

01:07 keen for customers to come and see that and say, yes, actually, that's what's really important

01:11 to us, or if it's not, actually, what would they like to see instead.

01:14 We recognise that customers in the Hastings area haven't had the service from Southern

01:18 Water that they should have done, but we are investing and we've got a really large big

01:22 sewer relining project to make sure that we don't have some of those bursts and those

01:26 pollutions we've had previously.

01:28 We've got a really exciting pilot happening in Fairlight where we're looking at water

01:31 baths and sustainable gardens so that we can reduce the number of storm overflows.

01:36 And where we had the water outage, we're absolutely looking at our networks and making sure that

01:40 we're replacing those pipes, taking lead and putting it into polyethylene pipes, which

01:44 are much more robust and better for the future so that we have fewer bursts, which means

01:48 that customers won't lose their water supply in future.

01:50 [BLANK_AUDIO]