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.
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NewsTranscript
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]