On Friday 15th December 2023, Jeremy Hunt MP and I welcomed over one hundred residents of Guildford, Godalming, and all areas affected by the recent water outages to a public meeting with Thames Water.
The panel included Al Cochran, Interim Co-CEO of Thames Water, Sarah Holland, Director of Operations Service, and Paul Wetton, Director of Water for Thames Valley and Home Counties.
This was an invaluable opportunity for residents to put their questions directly to Thames Water.
Al, Sarah and Paul gave a presentation describing the cause of the incident and Thames Water’s investments to ensure our water infrastructure is resilient.
I’m pleased that the company announced that they have set up a dedicated team to report on the resilience of Shalford Treatment works.
I know residents will appreciate Thames Water’s apology for the communications during the incident which they said weren’t good enough.
Thank you to all those who were able to attend and to those who submitted questions. These included: When can we expect to receive compensation for the water outages? What is being done to improve our existing infrastructure, to ensure that this doesn’t happen again? Why were the communications from the company not good enough and how can the its customer service be improved?
I hope that those who attended the meeting found it useful to hear from the company first-hand and get your questions answered.
I understand many of you may have further questions. If so, please get in touch with Thames Water, of if you would like to follow anything up, please get in touch with me via angela.richardson.mp@parliament.uk.
For those who were unable to attend on Friday, or would like to replay the slides presented by Thames Water in which they explained their response to last month’s major incident, a link to the recording is now available as promised: https://vimeo.com/895839516?share=copy
For those who would like more information about compensation, please use the following link with details of the Thames Water customer guarantee: Claiming compensation | About us | Thames Water