Recommendation 4

As regulators told South East Water repeatedly and jointly for over four years, the company needed to invest in new infrastructure to be properly resilient to potential shocks. In particular, single points of failure, supply shortfalls and regional connectivity should have been improved, but the company failed to take action on these well-known long-standing issues for many years. Spending allowances in previous price reviews may have made trade-off decisions more challenging, but ultimately, these decisions are primarily the responsibility of the company, which should have seen the role that poor infrastructure played in events since at least 2018. Worse still, through successive price reviews, SEW has either not attempted or did not succeed in making the necessary investment case. This also suggests that, as the long-term stewards of the business, shareholders also must share a portion of the responsibility for these failures. (Conclusion, Paragraph 25)