Katie Lam
MP for Weald of Kent · Conservative · United Kingdom
“I spent a day last week with the palliative care team at William Harvey hospital in Ashford, which serves a large chunk of my constituency, and I was amazed by how much time they spent gathering and sharing information.”
“Tomorrow, the Conservatives were going to ask for Parliament to sit for one more working day, so that the new Prime Minister could come here and set out his agenda for the country, which we could then scrutinise on behalf of all the people we represent.”
“Thank you, Mr Speaker. I would like to echo your tribute to a predecessor of mine, Ann Widdecombe. She was an exceptionally effective Member of Parliament, has been a really tough act to follow, and is very fondly remembered in the Weald.”
“Shabir Ahmed has committed some of the most despicable crimes imaginable. As the ringleader of the Rochdale grooming gang, he was responsible for grooming, trafficking and raping children as young as 12 years old. He was jailed in 2012 for 30 counts of child rape.”
“How can he possibly be allowed to walk the streets again? When the law produces an outcome that is clearly so wrong, the law must be changed. The Government must now change this law to make sure that we can remove Ahmed.”
“Twiggy Roberts, who is a veteran himself and runs HX Motors in my constituency, training other veterans to maintain and customise Land Rovers, says that he hears a lot from veterans of his generation about their frustrations as they try to gain access to the mental health services that they need and deserve, especially when dealing with p…”
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“I spent a day last week with the palliative care team at William Harvey hospital in Ashford, which serves a large chunk of my constituency, and I was amazed by how much time they spent gathering and sharing information. They were clicking through on really old systems, all on pdf, which takes up a huge amount of time that they could instead be spending on clinical care, especially given how technology is evolving. When are we going to get past the situation in which every single time a doctor sees a patient, it is like the whole interaction with the NHS is happening for the very first time?”
“Tomorrow, the Conservatives were going to ask for Parliament to sit for one more working day, so that the new Prime Minister could come here and set out his agenda for the country, which we could then scrutinise on behalf of all the people we represent. Instead, there will be a general debate which, no matter the topic, can have no actionable outcome. We will have no chance for a month and a half to scrutinise the Prime Minister’s plans. I ask the Leader of the House genuinely: how does he think that looks to the people who send us here?”
“My question to the Home Secretary is one that those women were asking: why did they endure the years of pain and danger that it took to have their abusers put in prison, only for this Government to let them out again after such a short time?”
“Thank you, Mr Speaker. I would like to echo your tribute to a predecessor of mine, Ann Widdecombe. She was an exceptionally effective Member of Parliament, has been a really tough act to follow, and is very fondly remembered in the Weald. On behalf of my constituents, whom she served for decades—a role that she fulfilled with outstanding dedication—I would just like to say thank you. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] Last week I met a group of victims and survivors of the most appalling sexual violence, like Angela. It is not her real name, but Angela was first raped by her stepfather at the age of eight. He then sold her to men for sex to pay off his gambling debts. He was sentenced to just 10 years in prison and, having served only six, is now being let out early by the Government.”
“Twiggy Roberts, who is a veteran himself and runs HX Motors in my constituency, training other veterans to maintain and customise Land Rovers, says that he hears a lot from veterans of his generation about their frustrations as they try to gain access to the mental health services that they need and deserve, especially when dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder. It would be good to hear about what conversations the Secretary of State is having with Cabinet colleagues, particularly those in the Department of Health and Social Care, about how veterans can be given access to those services. They give one another great support, but it is clearly not the same as support from professionals.”
“(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department if she will make a statement on whether the Government are planning to change the law to deport Rochdale grooming gang leader, Shabir Ahmed.”
“If they do not, people across this country will rightly ask, as they are already asking, whether this is a Government that can really keep the British people safe.”
“How can he possibly be allowed to walk the streets again? When the law produces an outcome that is clearly so wrong, the law must be changed. The Government must now change this law to make sure that we can remove Ahmed. Conservative Members, including the Leader of the Opposition, have made it clear that, if the Home Secretary puts forward changes to the law that would allow us to deport Shabir Ahmed, we will support them. The shadow Home Secretary has already drafted an amendment that the Government could adopt. The argument for deporting Ahmed is clear, and the mechanism has already been created. All that remains in question is whether the Government have the will to act. If so, we will be happy to support them.”
“Shabir Ahmed has committed some of the most despicable crimes imaginable. As the ringleader of the Rochdale grooming gang, he was responsible for grooming, trafficking and raping children as young as 12 years old. He was jailed in 2012 for 30 counts of child rape. His victims were promised that when he got out of prison, he would be deported back to Pakistan. He has been released from prison, but now we are told that he will not be deported because of a provision in the 1971 Immigration Act. The idea that he might be allowed to stay in this country because of a clause in a decades-old law designed for a completely different time and context is not just absurd, but sickening. As recently as 2023, parole officers concluded that Ahmed posed a “very high risk of serious harm” to children.”
“In June, 20 grooming gang perpetrators were jailed for offences in West Yorkshire, which included the rape and abuse of three girls of whom the youngest was aged just 12. Abbas Kaji was sentenced to just seven years for rape, and Mohammed Ishtiaq Hussain to just eight. All too soon, these vile men will be back on the streets of the very communities that they terrorised, and the idea that the Government could cut their sentences to be even shorter is terrifying. This is not about the past but about the present and the future, so can the Minister please assure the House that everybody involved in grooming and rape gang offences will, at the very least, serve the entirety of their already too-short sentences?”
“More illegal migrants will enter the endless cycle of appeals and legal challenges, allowing them to stay here for years at the taxpayer’s expense. More people will be put at risk because of these plans and because of the Government’s unwillingness truly to solve this problem for good.”
“As Conversative Members have made clear time and again, the only real solution to the crisis at our border is to remove illegal migrants as soon as they arrive. People must know that if they try to break our laws, they cannot stay. For it to be possible to remove people as soon as they arrive, we must leave the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights that prevents us from doing so, but the Government refuse to recognise that. They are in hock to activist lawyers in this country and unaccountable judges in Strasbourg, and keeping those people happy takes precedence over keeping the British people safe and delivering on their democratic will. The plans before us are another sorry example of that.”
“Since the last election, 75,000 people have crossed the channel. In the past few weeks alone, 3,000 have made the crossing. For all the Government’s talk of removals, nearly all of them—some 93%—are being allowed to stay. The Minister boasts about a reduction in outstanding decisions, but they have achieved that reduction by granting asylum to thousands upon thousands of illegal migrants. The Minister said in his statement that to stop the use of asylum hotels for good “we must go further, and that means scaling up our use of larger, more basic facilities.” He is right that the Government must go further to stop the use of asylum hotels for good, but he is utterly wrong that the problem is solved by instead spending huge resources to create other places to live for those who arrive here illegally.”
“For all the talk of smashing the gangs, they reveal that this Government do not have any faith in their own ability to fix the problem. If they are so sure that they are ending illegal channel crossings, why are the Government making plans to host illegal migrants in this country until 2030? What does that tell us about their confidence in their own approach? The truth is that this Government have no intention of fixing the problem: they care only about managing people’s perceptions of it. While they talk up the reduction in illegal migrants living in hotels, they conveniently leave out the fact that thousands more migrants are being housed in so-called dispersal accommodation: homes in the middle of our towns and cities where illegal migrants pose an even greater risk to the public.”
“That is exactly the same playbook that the Government have tried to use in places like Inverness where, thanks to the work of the Conservative group on the Highland council, the Home Office’s plans to house illegal migrants at Cameron barracks were blocked. We have seen in far too many cases the risk that illegal migrants, most of them young men, pose to the public, particularly to women and children. If the Government are planning to force communities to live alongside people who have shown complete contempt for our laws and norms by the very act of coming here illegally, the least that they can do is to allow those plans to be subject to proper scrutiny. Now that we finally have an opportunity to scrutinise the plans, we can perhaps see why the Government were so keen to hide them.”
“I thank the Minister for advance sight of his statement, which confirms what we have suspected since last week: this Government are planning to put more illegal migrants into sites across the country. Some of those sites are due to host illegal migrants until 2030, yet the Government did not think that it was worth alerting the hon. Members who represent those communities and live nearby ahead of the announcement in the press. Rather than subjecting the plans to proper scrutiny here in Parliament, the Government tried to sneak the news out quietly before the weekend, without discussion here in this place by those people’s democratically elected representatives.”
“On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I understand that the Home Office is due tonight to announce 12 new asylum seeker centres across the country, with no statement to the House or notification to Members here. This is a very, very important issue for our constituents. I seek your guidance on how we might encourage the Government to release this sort of information here first, so that we can scrutinise it on behalf of the people we represent.”
“I only hope that the chaos in Government will provide the new Defence Ministers— whenever they arrive—with an excuse to drop the Bill for good, and that they will instead support the private Member’s Bill brought forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Lincoln Jopp), which I am honoured to support. Our Northern Ireland veterans made unimaginable sacrifices to keep us safe. It is not a lot to ask that we protect them from this nightmare in return.”
“Earlier this week, we heard that we would be rid of this Prime Minister, who has repeatedly let down those currently serving in our armed forces by refusing to provide them with the material support they need, as well as those who have served previously, through the disastrous Northern Ireland Troubles Bill. I hope that his exit foreshadows the exit of the Attorney General and the Northern Ireland Secretary, both of whom have been responsible for advancing and defending the Bill. They have been warned repeatedly about what an awful signal it sends to those who are currently serving. Why would anybody risk their lives if their own Government might throw them under the bus decades later?”
“This Government’s troubles Bill will mean more cases like that one, with more veterans dragged through the courts, hounded in the press, and forced to testify at countless inquests and inquiries. It will scrap the protections put in place by the previous Government and open the doors to a whole new wave of politically motivated prosecutions. The Government say that this is necessary because of our obligations under the European Court of Human Rights, but if protecting our veterans from vexatious prosecution is not compatible with ECHR membership, what better case can there be for leaving the ECHR altogether?”
“The three IRA men who were killed that day set out to murder a part-time soldier, and the actions of the SAS were designed to prevent that murder from happening. Fortunately, they succeeded. That operation took place before I was even born, yet until earlier this year, the soldiers who took part in it were still being subjected to legal harassment for their actions that day. More than three decades later, lawyers with no specialist knowledge of military operations were asked to rule on whether those soldiers had behaved in accordance with human rights law, which was not designed for combat. Fortunately, the Court of Appeal determined that the SAS had acted lawfully, but other veterans have not been so lucky.”
“It was their intention to murder a part-time member of the Ulster Defence Regiment, a regiment of the British Army made up of local recruits from Northern Ireland. On reaching the village, the car stopped. One of the men got out and pointed an assault rifle at the person he believed to be their target, but who was in fact a member of the Special Air Service in disguise. Believing that the decoy’s life was in immediate danger, other SAS soldiers, hidden on the first floor of a nearby hotel, opened fire on the IRA men. All three were killed. Investigation at the scene showed that two of those men, Lawrence McNally and Michael Ryan, were armed with assault rifles. The third man, Tony Doris, was not armed, which the SAS soldiers who carried out the ambush could not have known.”
“Many of those who served have been hounded for decades by vexatious legal claims. They include people who served in our armed forces and those who served in the police in Northern Ireland, which was then called the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Typically, these challenges have been politically motivated and brought by people linked to the Irish republican movement, often to furnish the republican narrative that our security forces behaved unlawfully throughout the troubles. Such challenges are usually launched not on the basis of new evidence, but because of the retrospective application of human rights laws that were never designed to govern counter-terrorist combat. On the morning of 3 June 1991, three members of the IRA drove a stolen car into a small village in County Tyrone.”
“They behaved according to rules of engagement that did not constrain their terrorist enemies. They followed orders and procedures designed to protect innocent life. When those standards were not met, people were held responsible. Again, no such internal scrutiny took place within the terrorist organisations that they fought. Indeed, under the terms of the Belfast agreement and subsequent legislation, IRA terrorists were given immunity from prosecution, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) set out earlier. Many were released from prison before their sentences had been served, despite having carried out terrorist attacks that killed civilians. That charity and forgiveness stands in stark contrast to the treatment in the opposite direction.”
“Their Northern Ireland Troubles Bill is a direct betrayal of that promise, and it will see veterans dragged through the courts and hounded by endless inquiries, decades after their service. Those who served in Northern Ireland did so at incredible personal risk. They operated under intensely challenging conditions, the likes of which most of us in this place—save for some gallant Members—will never be forced to withstand. They did all this to keep our country safe from murderous psychopaths who wanted to undermine our democracy and tear our country apart through the use of terrorist violence, the assassination of police officers and the murder of innocent civilians. Over the course of their service, the vast majority of those who served in our security forces did so with incredible professionalism.”
“We are incredibly fortunate that anybody puts themselves forward to serve, and even more fortunate that over the years this country has produced many thousands of courageous, professional and dutiful people who have preserved the freedom of this country and, at times, the world. The very least that the British Government can do is to treat these people—our armed forces personnel—fairly, to honour the implicit promise that their service will be repaid with respect and protection, and to make sure that when orders are issued from on high, the people charged with carrying out those orders are not punished for doing so. Since the last election, we have seen this Government do exactly the opposite.”
“As my colleagues on the Conservative Benches have already noted, today and previously, the defence of the realm is the first duty of any Government, and as a fundamental part of that duty, any Government must provide the people who volunteer to keep our country safe—at great personal risk—with the tools they need and the support they deserve. Our country is not kept safe by people in this place or by bureaucrats in Whitehall offices. It is kept safe by brave men and women who put their lives on the line because they believe in this country and want to protect it. They suspend their family lives, they risk their own lives, and they operate in incredibly difficult conditions, because they think that this country is worth suffering for—and even dying for. They do this of their own free will, and certainly not for any great sums of money.”
“Once that cash is deposited, it can be paid out as profit to those involved in running the organisation, for example as a fake invoice to an overseas supplier that is paid out to a shell company registered abroad. The criminal gangs involved in the drug trade operate across borders both financially and physically. They will have overseas suppliers who provide them with the drugs that they sell. These supply networks are often sustained by links between people of the same nationality, ethnicity or even extended family. Often, these drug gangs are also involved in other kinds of cross-border smuggling—of counterfeit goods, illegal tobacco and, indeed, people.”
“When that gang sells drugs to people, payment will most often be made in cash, because cash is harder to trace. However, if that business wants to bring its cash into the normal financial system, it will need to launder the money so as not to provoke suspicion. If a person suddenly deposits tens of thousands of pounds with no clear income source, a bank will register that as suspicious, but not so if the money is deposited by a high street business. The gang might therefore set up a high street shop—something cash-intensive and with low overhead costs, such as a vape shop. The shop records its transactions but adds to those real purchases a series of phantom cash sales used to disguise the illicit cash raised by the sale of drugs. The deposit appears legitimate and can be backed up with paperwork.”
“According to one survey, 99% of trading standards professionals have seen an increase in the number of cash-intensive businesses opening on their local high streets in recent years. Cash-intensive businesses often provide the best fronts for money laundering and the trade in illicit and counterfeit goods. While businesses that do the right thing are struggling with ever more regulation and ever higher taxes, businesses with links to organised crime are thriving. To combat the rise in illicit activity on our high streets, we must understand the criminal networks that sustain that activity and the link in many cases between those networks and immigration. Let us imagine, for example, an organised crime gang involved in the drugs trade.”
“Last month, the BBC uncovered that people smugglers are directing migrants to pay for illegal channel crossings using a network of high street businesses, including mobile phone shops. In 2024 alone, trading standards seized more than 1 million illegal vapes and 19 million illegal cigarettes. As the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Harpreet Uppal) mentioned, the National Crime Agency estimates that £1 billion of crime-linked cash is laundered through high street businesses every year. It is clearly difficult to produce reliable estimates of things such as money laundering, so the real figure may be even higher. The money laundered by such businesses often fuels human trafficking or the drug trade. The problem is only getting worse.”
“It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Dowd. I congratulate the hon. Member for Halesowen (Alex Ballinger) on securing this important debate. For far too many people and in far too many places, the high street has become a visible sign of where the British state has lost control. People suspect that the cash-only takeaways, barber’s shops and vape shops that they see springing up on their high streets are symptomatic of a deeper rot. As the hon. Gentleman and many others set out, in many cases they are right. All too often, such high street shops are linked to organised crime, including through the sale of illicit or counterfeit goods, money laundering, immigration crime and people smuggling.”
“Will the Minister share what proportion of Operation Machinize targets in cases related to counterfeit goods, illegal tobacco or vapes, money laundering or the sale of drugs were also involved in illegal working, visa fraud or organised immigration crime and people smuggling?”
“I would appreciate it if the Minister set out how the Home Office thinks about and plans to tackle the links between illicit activity on the high street, organised crime, immigration and people smuggling, and how the Department’s plans for tackling illicit activity on the high street take account of those links. Does it keep a record of how many businesses raided under high street organised crime operations were also registered visa sponsors? Does it keep a record of the visa status and visa type of those employed by these businesses? What proportion of high street businesses employing people illegally are repeat offenders like the one in my constituency?”
“On paper, these people work for a legitimate high street business, but in practice many of them will be using that apparently legitimate employment as cover for their work as part of a criminal gang. Others may be working, or forced to work, for dramatically less than the minimum wage, which both exploits them and distorts the labour market. That happens everywhere in the country. In the stunning town of Tenterden in my constituency, Indian restaurant Badsha was recently found to have been employing illegal migrants for a fourth time, racking up £120,000 in fines and not paying a single penny.”
“The hon. Member is right that the common travel area presents particular challenges. It is crucial to maintain the sorts of relationships he is talking about in a way that keeps the public safe in Northern Ireland and the whole country. If high street shops are already laundering money on behalf of these gangs, they might also sell the things that the gang illegally imports. They might serve as points of contact for people who are looking to smuggle people into Britain illegally, as was highlighted by the BBC’s most recent investigation. Those shops might also help criminal gangs to bring people into this country by sponsoring their visas. As my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (Neil O’Brien) has previously highlighted, many cash-intensive high street businesses sponsor an absurd number of visas.”
“Put simply, we can fix this problem by pursuing criminals, enforcing the law and letting law-abiding people get on with their lives. Given that so much of this abuse is triggered by shoplifting, and given how onerous the process of reporting it is, my main, specific question to the Minister is this: what kind of conversations has she had about changing the online reporting system, particularly in the light of technology innovations that could make it so much simpler and faster?”
“They feel their own behaviour is restricted, and they meet with resistance and hassle when they engage with the authorities, yet they see crime and disorder go unpunished. If they try to do something to stop the crime themselves, they are crushed. The rise in attacks against retail workers is one terrible manifestation of this, but there are many. This is clearly completely unfair but, fortunately, there is a solution. Speak to any member of the British public and they will be able to tell you exactly what to do: spend less time on policing speech and filling out paperwork and more time on catching thieves; give police forces the tools they need to tackle these crimes; and, when we catch a career criminal, make sure that they serve a proper prison sentence.”
“Suki, who manages the business, very kindly had me in for a morning shift last Friday. He told me that, despite years of reporting regular shoplifting to the police, the only time they had visited was to let him know that the pictures he had put up of regular thieves violated GDPR. He also walked me through his report to the police of the latest shoplifting incident he had suffered that Tuesday. The process was slow and repetitive—easily 10 times as long as it needed to be. For small business owners like Suki, who are already doing a million things at once, it is often hard to justify that wasted time. Especially given advances in technology, this seems a crazy way to insist that people record crimes. This is the experience of far too many people in Britain today.”
“Instead of going after the hyper-prolific offenders who drive such a disproportionate amount of crime in this country, the state responds by making life harder for ordinary people. Is it any wonder that so many people now feel that they are living under something called anarcho-tyranny? In such circumstances, the state is either unable or unwilling to control violent crime, theft and genuine disorder. While failing to enforce the law against genuine criminals, the state vigorously and inflexibly enforces a mountain of complex, often seemingly arbitrary rules on ordinary people who work hard, pay their taxes and do the right thing. That can produce infuriating and ludicrous outcomes. Shop Around the Clock, a fabulous store in St Michaels in my constituency, is plagued by shoplifting.”
“Failing to clamp down on crimes such as shoplifting is not cost-free. It does not just make life terrible for the businesses that are the direct victims of the theft; it puts retail workers and the public at risk. The kind of people who are engaged in habitual shoplifting are often involved in other types of crime, and they represent a very real danger to us all. Unfortunately, under this Government’s Sentencing Act 2026, up to 12,000 of this country’s most prolific shoplifters will avoid jail altogether, leaving them free to not just continue stealing but abuse and harass retail workers. While prolific offenders walk free, law-abiding people face ever more rules and restrictions, and ever greater suspicion from the authorities.”
“It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mrs Hobhouse. I congratulate the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Chris Evans) on securing the debate. As others have noted, the abuse faced by many people working in customer-facing roles is deeply distressing. We should all be concerned by the rise in abuse, threats and physical assault against people just trying to do their jobs. The trend cannot be divorced from the rise in so-called petty crime, including shoplifting, as several hon. Members have highlighted. According to a survey conducted by the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers, in cases where retail staff faced abuse, 70% of incidents had been triggered by shoplifting. Of those incidents, two thirds were related to drug addiction or suspected drug addiction.”
“I am sorry to say that I did not know the hon. Lady’s sister, but she sounds like a remarkable woman. I am one of two sisters, and I recognise very much from growing up the sort of family structure that the hon. Lady describes. What a testament it is to Jo as a person that, having grown up in such a family and known what the opposite of loneliness is—what companionship and family are—she thought first of people who did not enjoy that. That is a real testament to the person she was.”
“I want to use this opportunity to urge the regulator and the Minister, who I know is very focused on this issue, to do everything they can to encourage the company to go through a proper period of transformation. In this place and elsewhere, we will continue to hold it to account. However, it is important that South East Water is not just punished retrospectively, or after the fact, for its failures. Instead, we must ensure that it is taking the right steps to stop this problem becoming a permanent feature of life in the Weald of Kent.”
“That was a long time coming. Given their handling of the outages in January and the way they responded to the subsequent investigations, it was clear that change at South East Water was impossible under their leadership. They had shown no understanding of why they had failed, and no appreciation whatsoever of the harm they had caused to the people who rely on their service. Although the resignations are very much welcome, the problems at South East Water did not start with Mr Hinton’s appointment as chief executive and will not automatically end with his resignation. As the results of the survey demonstrate, the issues at South East Water are endemic. I hope the company will use the change of leadership as an opportunity for true transformation and to review how it operates, plans and communicates with the public.”
“Ofwat has recently proposed a £22 million fine following supply failures between 2020 and 2023, noting that South East Water “has not taken ownership” of the underlying issues that caused the outages. Given the recent outages, it is clear that it still has not learned a thing. The report produced by the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee was perhaps the most damning. It described the company as “devoid of proper leadership” and as “an unaccountable clique.” I thank the members of the Committee for their work in scrutinising South East Water’s leadership, particularly my hon. Friends the Members for South Northamptonshire (Sarah Bool) and for Bridlington and The Wolds (Charlie Dewhirst). In the light of those reports, both the chairman of South East Water, Chris Train, and the CEO, David Hinton, have resigned.”
“The company told him to go and pick up a pack of water. The sheer volume of the individual stories was horrific—one woman who had just given birth to children had to take her toddler in the back of the car to the bottled water stations, because she was on the vulnerable list, but deliveries had not been made. Of those who responded to the survey, four in every five said they had been left without running water over the past decade, and four in 10 said that they had been without running water four or more times over that same period. That is absurd in 21st-century Britain. Those self-reported experiences have been mirrored in recent months by a number of official inquiries into South East Water’s performance, both historically and in relation to the January outages.”
“Nearly 3,000 households responded, and it was immediately clear that the catastrophic handling of January’s outage was not a lapse in form. The company has been providing a terrible service for years, and people are absolutely right to be fed up with it. One disabled resident reported that, despite being on South East Water’s priority list for receiving bottled water during times of crisis, they received no water at all for the duration of the outage. Farmers, who simply cannot afford to have water shut off for days on end, reported that farms and livestock did not even seem to be a consideration. One local farmer reported that, despite many hours on the phone, South East Water were “totally unhelpful and rude, suggesting [that] I go and pick up a pack of water”. To put that into context, this farmer pays for 250 litres of water a day.”
“Come rain or shine, there are clearly serious problems at South East Water. On both occasions, but especially in January, communication was poor or non-existent. South East Water was unable to answer even basic questions, such as, “If I send my constituents to this bottled water station, will there be any bottled water for them when they get there?” The company took days to respond to emails to its supposedly instantaneous email address. It simply had no idea what was going on. For far too many people, this intermittent service and poor communication are part and parcel of life in the Weald of Kent. Earlier this year, I ran a water survey to ask people about their historical experiences with South East Water.”
“It is a pleasure to speak with you in the Chair, Mr Twigg. I thank the hon. Member for Ashford (Sojan Joseph) for securing the debate. For people in the Weald of Kent, problems with the water supply have become depressingly common. The most recent outages, last month, left thousands of people without water or experiencing severely low pressure during a heatwave. South East Water, which covers the Weald of Kent, said that it had planned for the heatwave, but thousands of people across the Weald were still once again left without running water, unable to wash, cook, or run their businesses or farms. That followed a larger outage earlier this year, which left tens of thousands of people across Kent and Sussex without running water for days. That time, South East Water blamed a freeze and thaw event and the impact of Storm Goretti.”