Water Supply and Housing Targets: West Kent

(Limited Text - Ministerial Extracts only)

Tuesday 24th March 2026 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Miatta Fahnbulleh)]

I thank the right hon. Member for Tonbridge (Tom Tugendhat) for securing this debate and other hon. Members for their contributions. I appreciate the concerns raised around the challenges of meeting the housing target and the appalling situation with the water company and water shortages.

I share the frustration of the right hon. Member for Tonbridge at the lack of adequate provision—water is a basic thing that we should be able to provide to all homes in every part of the country. We know that the status quo is not good enough, and I will set out the steps that we are taking in response. Let me be clear at the outset that the water supply disruption that South East Water customers have faced is wholly unacceptable. My colleagues, both in my Department and in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, have been robust on that, and Ofwat will do its job by holding South East Water to account.

DEFRA has also set up the water delivery taskforce to do the job of holding companies to account on the questions of existing capacity to deliver water to homes and future capacity to deliver for the future homes that we need. To date, the taskforce has led work across the Government, regulators and the water sector to resolve blockers where water scarcity issues have stalled development, for example in Oxford, Cambridgeshire and north Sussex. That work has unblocked 10,000 new homes. David Hinton, the chief executive of South East Water, will be appearing before the April taskforce, which will scrutinise the company’s performance, ask the very questions that the right hon. Member for Tonbridge has asked today and demand improvements in delivery.

We are alive to the issues that have been raised in this debate. Alongside action taken through the taskforce, officials across DEFRA and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government are working in partnership with Tonbridge and Malling borough council to explore short-term interventions to progress both current planning applications and local plan development. They will draw on our experience in north Sussex and Cambridge, where we have achieved progress, and explore options to commission an independent review of groundwater headroom, new home building standards and retrofitting existing buildings.

[Helen Whately]

The Minister mentioned that the water taskforce will be meeting with David Hinton, the chief executive of South East Water, to hold him to account for its abysmal performance in the recent outages. If that taskforce finds that South East Water’s response has been inadequate, as I believe it was, what action will the taskforce be able to take? I believe that David Hinton should no longer be the chief executive because of those failures.

[Miatta Fahnbulleh]

In the short term, the priority is to make sure that the company has a viable plan so that we can deliver the homes that we want. The approach that the taskforce has taken in other areas is to sit alongside the company to stress-test its proposals and propose improvements to them so that we can get the building happening. As the hon. Member will know, we are driving through bigger reforms of the water sector because we recognise that the status quo is suboptimal and that we need to hold companies and their bosses to account where they are not delivering for their customers.

[Alison Bennett (Mid Sussex) (LD)]

The Minister refers to the changes made in Sussex; I assume she means the changes made around Horsham, which relate to Southern Water, rather than South East Water. Nothing that has changed there has increased water supply; it has merely unlocked the restrictions on house building. My concern is that the timescales for the water delivery workforce are very long, but those for delivering district plans and the Government’s housing targets are very short. Surely the challenge is that they are totally at odds with each other.

[Miatta Fahnbulleh]

The hon. Lady makes an important point. It is a challenge, but our job is to work across Government and the different agencies, and with the water companies, to rise to the challenge. I gently point out that over the past decade and a half, the Conservative party could have introduced reforms to bring our water sector up to scratch and deliver what our communities need for the housing they also need. That was not done, so we are working on it at record speed. Our commitment is to work holistically across the piece to resolve the challenge, but we absolutely recognise that it is a challenge.

Hon. Members have questioned the validity of our housing targets. It is absolutely right that the Government are taking bold action to overhaul the planning system and carry out the reforms necessary to deliver the homes and infrastructure that every single community needs. There is consensus across the House that the status quo in terms of housing development is not adequate for the needs in our communities, so we have to step up.

We believe that our revised standard method strikes the right balance between meeting the scale of need across the country and focusing additional growth on the places facing the biggest affordability pressures. While those targets are ambitious, we have always been clear that they are necessary, given our inheritance. The key is to ensure we work consistently across the different parts of the system to deliver that objective and ambition.

[Helen Whately]

Will the Minister give way?

[Miatta Fahnbulleh]

I will make more progress.

The lack of water infrastructure is blocking our capacity to deliver more homes and is resulting in water outages such as those in west Kent. That is a clear signal that we need wholesale reform and that the system is not doing what needs to be done.

We believe that we can secure water supplies for the future only by managing water demand, reducing leakages and creating new water assets. We have to do all three of those things, and we are working with the water industry and the regulator to do that.

[Tom Tugendhat]

I understand that the Minister is talking about very short-term interventions, but this is about 13,000 homes over a period running up to 2042. I was not going to be partisan about it, but this has come about because of the removal of planning requirements from cities such as London and their imposition on areas such as west Kent. That is a Government decision, and they have a mandate to execute it. They and the Green party voted through the change of green belt into this imaginary grey belt—again, they have the mandate to do that—but let us not pretend that it is not a political choice. The political choice that her Government have made has resulted in increased pressure on water companies, which did not exist before. We can play political games if she wishes, but the reality is that this is a very clear political reallocation from the need in London to the need in rural areas.

[Miatta Fahnbulleh]

Let me address that point directly. We are clear that we are not building enough homes across every part of the country, and we are trying to ensure that the system delivers. Whether it is my community in London or the right hon. Gentleman’s community in Tonbridge, the reality is that there are not enough affordable homes for people to live in—a situation none of us wants. It is absolutely right to have housing targets commensurate with the need. I do not believe that politics is being played here; we are trying to deal with the need in parts of the country where there is both demand and the capacity to deliver more homes.

I acknowledge that there is a problem with the wider system and the infrastructure that we are building, and we are addressing it, but that is made harder by the fact that, candidly, a lot of these problems have been here for a decade and a half. They could have been addressed, but they were not, so we are trying to do that. We are having to do it all at the same time, but nobody can ask us to resile from our ambition to build enough homes for people to live in.

[Helen Whately]

I thank the Minister very much for taking a second intervention from me. I do not disagree that the country needs more homes; that is an accepted fact. However, what we have seen under her Government is housing targets being shifted out of London, so that London’s numbers have fallen and the numbers in the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge (Tom Tugendhat) and in my constituency of Faversham and Mid Kent have gone up. Against that backdrop, I have not seen London homes having large outages where they have not had enough water for days on end, whereas in Kent we have had them on multiple occasions. Yet still her Government persist in reducing the housing ambitions for London and putting more housing in rural areas, such as our constituencies, where we simply do not have the infrastructure that is needed. Surely she must recognise that the Government need to change tack.

[Miatta Fahnbulleh]

On that specific point, our methodology is trying to strike a balance, where we think there is both need for homes and the capacity to build those homes. I absolutely acknowledge that the water sector and some of our other infrastructure providers are not where they need to be. All the reforms we are trying to drive through in planning reform and the water sector, and the robust action that we are taking to work across the piece, are in response to that very problem.

For example, in the context of the investment required to build our water assets, the Government are ensuring that £104 billion of private sector investment is going into the water sector over five years to enable that building of assets. I want to reassure the right hon. Member for Tonbridge and hon. Members that the Government will introduce the water reform Bill when parliamentary time allows, working in partnership with water companies, investors and communities to make sure that we have a system that is fit for purpose.

An important part of that reform, which pertains to this very debate, is the establishment of regional water planning function, which will enable a more holistic, co-ordinated approach to water, environment and supply planning and support the delivery of national strategic objectives such as economic growth, meeting house building targets and nature recovery, while enabling regional and local priorities to be realised. That more joined-up approach will deliver a more resilient and future-proof water system—that is our hope and our intention—better able to absorb shocks, which will hopefully prevent situations such as those we have seen in west Kent from ever happening again. I think there is consensus that such situations are appalling and that we absolutely must mitigate them in the future.

To answer the direct questions put by the right hon. Member for Tonbridge about the water companies and their role in the planning system, we are just going through the responses to a consultation on statutory consultees. The Government intend to list water companies and sewage companies as consultation bodies for new plan-making, so that they are involved right up front in the system. However, we are also looking at their relationship with regard to planning applications in particular, for the reasons that he set out.

Critically, the right hon. Gentleman also asked me to sit down and discuss this issue with my team and other Ministers. My hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook) is the Minister for Housing and Planning, but I will take that suggestion away and get that meeting in the diary as a priority, because we appreciate and understand the specific issues. I come back to the fact that we know there is a systemic problem; we are working hard to deal with it, but we recognise the urgency of the situation, because the plan-making process is happening.

To conclude, I again commend the right hon. Member for Tonbridge for securing this important debate and shining a spotlight on the particular issues and concerns in his constituency. I return to the fact that the status quo is appalling; the water shortages that we have are absolutely unacceptable, and the Government are committed to working with him and with his local council to make sure that we are resolving this situation.

We all agree that we need more homes. We also all agree that the water sector has to be reformed, so that we can deliver the infrastructure we need to service those homes. This Government are committed, as we have been from day one, to driving through whole-system reform to ensure that the interaction between planning, house building and the wider infrastructure sector is right and fit for purpose, in order to deliver what we need. I look forward to continuing our engagement and to making sure that we resolve the specific issue with the plan and the capacity within the plan. My Department is ready and willing to work very closely with the council to do that, and we will take the plan forward.

I again thank the right hon. Member for securing this debate and you, Sir John, for chairing it.

Question put and agreed to.