The chief executive of South East Water, David Hinton, resigned from the embattled utility today, after presiding over one of the scandal-hit industry’s most notorious supply failures. Hinton was in charge during a series of outages in Tunbridge Wells and Kent in November and December 2025, with further outages in January 2026. As the firm struggled to restore supply, his stewardship became a political talking point amid widespread outrage over a perceived lack of investment in critical infrastructure after privatisation.
Parliamentary scrutiny and public outrage
Hinton was hauled in front of Parliament to account for the disruption, during which tens of thousands of homes were affected. When asked to give his firm’s handling of the extended crisis a mark out of ten, Hinton plumped for eight. In December, 16,000 homes were cut off from mains water supply for almost a week. Hinton’s last appearance at the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs select committee was in April. The £400,000-a-year executive, in terms of base salary, told MPs he would refuse any bonus payment for the 2025 to 2026 financial year. He was awarded £115,000 on top of his base salary for the previous financial year.
Damning committee verdict
The committee itself took the highly unusual step of declaring it had “no confidence” in Hinton in a highly damning report issued at the start of this month. It said: “South East Water presents as a company devoid of proper leadership, riddled with cultural problems that raise serious concerns about the ability of the executive team, led by the chief executive officer David Hinton, to bring the company back into compliance and deliver the services their customers deserve.” South East Water’s non-executive chair, Chris Train, left around the time the committee’s report came out.
Regulatory investigations and fines
Hinton will remain in post as the firm seeks a successor. The company said today that he had “decided to step down as he feels his position has become an increasing distraction from South East Water’s most important priority, which is to deliver a resilient water supply for its customers.” A report into its handling of the 2025 outages from regulators at the Drinking Water Inspectorate said that South East Water was “flying blind” into the crisis and that it should have taken action weeks before the disruption took hold. In March, the firm was fined £22m by Ofwat, around 8 per cent of the company’s turnover. The regulator said its investigation “found that the company’s response was slow and disorganised, with shortages of bottled water and not enough tankers or support for vulnerable customers. It also failed to learn lessons from previous incidents.”
