Southern Water, Sewage and Kent’s Water Crisis Reach County Hall

Updated 18 March 2026

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

Cllr Stuart Heaver’s motion on water infrastructure is serious, overdue and mostly right. But Kent does not have a sewage problem because too few letters have been written. It has one because the system keeps failing, the public keep being exposed, and officialdom keeps acting as though another report might somehow mop it up.

On Thursday 19 March, Kent County Council will debate a Green Group motion called Strengthening Water Infrastructure and Resilience, proposed by Cllr Stuart Heaver (Green – pictured) and seconded by Cllr Mark Hood (Green). It is, on paper at least, one of the more grown-up items to reach County Hall in a while. Instead of culture-war confetti, it deals with the rather old-fashioned idea that people ought to have reliable water, functioning sewerage, and rivers and seas that do not double as a microbiology practical. The motion calls for changes to planning law, more scrutiny of water resilience, reporting from South East Water, Southern Water and the Environment Agency, citizen-science testing teams, scrutiny of public-health and economic impacts, and the inclusion of waterborne pollution in KCC’s environment work. The Green Group’s background note frames this around outages, contamination, wastewater spills, public-health risk and the fact that water companies are not statutory consultees on ordinary planning applications.

That basic framing matters because it is exactly where the argument has been heading in recent Shepway Vox reporting. The point has not been that sewage is merely unsightly, embarrassing, or bad for a summer postcard. The point has been that it is a public-health issue. Professor Chris Whitty said as much in 2022, and the Royal Academy of Engineering–led work commissioned in this area in 2024 was explicitly about reducing health risks from water polluted with faecal organisms from human waste. Shepway Vox’s recent coverage has then brought that national warning down to Kent scale, pointing to Dr Iain Goodall’s evidence to Canterbury councillors about elevated E. coli in the Stour, including resistant organisms, and to Dr Anjan Ghosh’s position as Kent’s Director of Public Health, with a clear role in health protection even if he is not himself the regulator of wastewater permits.

In that sense, Heaver’s motion is not eccentric. It is belated. KCC’s own papers from November last year already accepted that Kent is one of the driest regions in England, that climate change and growth are intensifying pressure on water resources, and that parts of Kent including Folkestone & Hythe are under serious water stress. So nobody at Sessions House can now pull the old face of startled innocence, as though water scarcity, outages and wastewater strain have arrived unannounced like a distant cousin with a suitcase. County Hall already knows the county has a water problem. The question is whether it wants to behave like it.

The strongest part of the motion is the planning point. The Green paper is right to say that water companies are statutory consultees on planning policy, but not on ordinary planning applications unless invited. Southern Water says that itself in black and white. That matters because Kent keeps trying to build homes, approve growth and talk breezily about infrastructure while the people who actually have to supply the water and handle the sewage are too often brought in late, half-heard, or treated as a side note. On that, the motion lands a proper blow. If planning decisions are allowed to pretend water capacity is somebody else’s problem, then sooner or later it becomes everybody’s problem, usually with a hosepipe ban, a foul overflow, or both.

But a granular read shows the motion is not perfect. Its first line asks for a letter to the “Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities”. Whitehall retired that branding in July 2024. The department is now the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, and the ministerial post is the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government. That is not a fatal flaw. It is, however, a slightly comic one. When you are trying to persuade central government to take water infrastructure seriously, it helps if the envelope is addressed to the department that actually exists.

The third limb of the motion is also slightly woolly in the drafting. It asks Southern Water and South East Water for predictions of combined sewer overflow spills per year from all Kent wastewater sewage treatment works. The intent is fair enough: residents want hard numbers, not interpretive dance. But the terminology is muddy. Official guidance distinguishes storm overflows on the sewer network from storm overflows at sewage treatment works, even though both are monitored and both matter. So this part of the motion could do with tightening. Kent should be asking for a fuller public picture of predicted spills, duration, asset condition, treatment-works constraints and network constraints, rather than a phrase that risks mixing unlike things together in one very unhappy bucket.

Where the motion becomes genuinely good again is on citizen science and on the public-health and economic framing. Shepway Vox has been hammering away at the same truth for weeks: when Dr Goodall – pictured – is describing poor water quality and resistant organisms, when Professor Whitty is warning that sewage in water is a health issue, and when local bathing waters such as Dymchurch and Littlestone have been rated poor with advice against bathing, the old line that this is just an environmental nuisance starts to look ridiculous. Citizen testing, done properly, can help expose what official complacency too often hides. And asking how outages and waterborne pollution affect public services is exactly the sort of question a county council should be asking, because schools, care settings, public health, tourism and local economies do not operate in a magical parallel universe where dirty water has no consequences.

Still, the motion ducks one of the hardest points in the whole Kent sewage row: enforcement. Recent Shepway Vox reporting has not just catalogued filth and frustration; it has argued that district councils already have real powers over foul watercourses through the statutory nuisance route. It has also argued that Dr Anjan Ghosh can push the issue firmly into the health-protection frame and put pressure on authorities to use the powers they already possess. Heaver’s motion hints at that world, but stops short of naming it. It asks for reports, updates, letters and incorporation into plans. All worthwhile. But Kent does not only suffer from a shortage of correspondence. It suffers from an excess of bodies politely passing the parcel. At some stage, someone has to stop writing about the foul water and start using the law about the foul water.

That omission matters even more because the local record is already ugly enough. Shepway Vox has reported Folkestone & Hythe District Council’s public confrontation with Southern Water and the Environment Agency, and the poor bathing-water ratings on this coast, and the grim fact that warnings about sewage on the Kent coast stretch back decades. In other words, Kent is not staring at a one-off mishap. It is staring at a system that has been creaking, spilling and apologising for far too long. Which is why any decent motion on water has to be judged by one standard only: does it increase the chance of cleaner water, or merely the volume of official paperwork?

So where does that leave Stuart Heaver’s motion? In a better place than most council motions, frankly. It is serious. It is rooted in real problems. It understands that water resilience, planning, pollution and public health belong in the same conversation. It is also a little too fond of asking people to write to each other, a little too cautious about the enforcement question, and a little too polite for a county that has had enough of being told that the latest spill, outage or contamination scare is simply one of those things.

Kent does not need another ceremonial exchange of stern letters and warmer words. It needs hard scrutiny, cleaner water, better data, proper planning, public-health leadership, and councils willing to use the powers they already have. If this motion helps shove County Hall in that direction, good. If it becomes just another exercise in sounding concerned while the water carries on getting dirtier, residents will be entitled to conclude that resilience, in Kent officialese, means surviving the failure rather than preventing it.

Update: This motion was pulled due to the by-election in Cliftonville – Margate, but KCC after receiving legal advice, decided it will now be discussed at Full Council on the 19 March.

The Shepway Vox Team

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