First it was Sunday at 6am. Then 6pm. Monday at 8am. The next day. By the evening of Tuesday 2 December, a water company stopped promising that an entire town and surrounding villages’ drinking water supply would be back on. It also admitted it was not only far from resolving the water outage, but the water it had already released into the system was still contaminated and did not meet quality standards for drinking, cooking, or most forms of public cleanliness.
My area of Tunbridge Wells, and more than 25,000 other homes, was without water for five days, and then advised to boil before use for a further eight. This was not just inconvenience – it fast became a public health emergency. The local hospital sent patients to London, care homes ran on bottled water. Most businesses shut for multiple days, and those in hospitality ran limited operations, affecting their income. Schools, nurseries, community centres, coffee shops, gyms, park toilets – all closed.
In scenes reminiscent of the pandemic lockdowns, shops and supermarkets ran out of water supplies within 36 hours. Queues of up to two hours formed at water stations set up by South East Water, causing traffic gridlocks. Those on foot wheeled suitcases, wheelbarrows and buggies home (ironically, in pouring rain) as bottled water became the only safe commodity.
‘Fragile and depleted service infrastructure’
As a resident, this experience has been chilling for multiple reasons.
Firstly, while the outage at the Pembury Water Treatment site was caused by human error, it reveals how fragile the UK’s water system – alongside many other essential services – is in the face of errors, disasters, and disruptions. It exposes our depleted service infrastructure and lack of fall-back for critical services. This particular outage centred on a spa town in Kent, but it could’ve been anywhere – or, indeed, everywhere. The government’s Environmental Performance Assessment (EPA) reviews published in 2024 found eight of the nine water companies operating in England were rated ‘poor’ or ‘requiring improvement’ in environmental performance. Incidents of water pollution amounted to over £100m in fines through 2024 alone. Whilst there have been other areas of more concrete energy security planning – such as the government’s 2025 Resilience Action Plan to prevent a national electrical grid outage similar to the national blackouts in Spain over the summer – our access to safe, clean and reliable water, possibly our most critical commodity to life and to public health, has continued to deteriorate.
Community resilience
Secondly, it reveals how little momentum there has been in mobilising UK community resilience in the face of increasingly likely shocks, outages or national disasters. The UK Government’s 2023 Resilience Framework calls for ‘a more diverse set of groups and partners […] to prepare for and respond to emergencies on a ‘whole of society’ scale.’ Similarly, the Government’s Community Resilience Framework seeks to enable ‘businesses, individuals, community networks and voluntary organisations [to be] empowered to prepare, respond and recover from emergencies and disasters.’ The Young Foundation’s 2025 report into a whole society response for national preparedness found people, communities and voluntary organisations consistently stepping up during crises – from the Covid-19 pandemic to floods, terrorist attacks, and civil unrest. It found these responses essential for effective crisis management, particularly for protecting vulnerable and marginalised communities, who face disproportionate impacts of disasters. In this area, the UK’s lack of activity is in stark contrast to many other nations’. Scandinavian countries, Germany, Finland, Estonia – all have a mass public communication strategy to boost household resilience. For example, citizens have a supply of emergency bottled water to hand in case of water outage, as well as a kit of wipes, food, and medical supplies. This contrasts to the UK, where the recent survey into our sense of national preparedness found over half of households feel slightly or not at all prepared for a crisis or disaster.
‘No local, whole-system response’
Thirdly, and sadly, it reveals how little has been learned and retained from the pandemic in generating a multi-agency and multi-actor crisis response. In Tunbridge Wells, I have seen no evidence of a local, whole-system response. The World Health Organisation (WHO) states there should be a unified and joint command structure including operation of an emergency coordination hub; welfare check-ins in person by authorities supporting vulnerable residents; alongside a clear, accessible and complete public communication that guards against digital non-users or IT illiteracy. The only public communication I’m aware of was on text, social media or South East Water’s website. Those digitally excluded or isolated may have struggled to know the risks, or how they should act. Further, a priority services register, set up to support vulnerable residents, did not deliver water or clear information to a number of households, including my own. I didn’t hear of door-to-door checks, or see guidance leaflets, personnel on the ground, or community centres or ‘hubs’ open for people to use bathrooms, wash up, prepare baby formula. In my experience, echoed by other residents and businesses, the response was neither strategic nor holistic.
Lessons from Covid
Research into the Covid-19 pandemic found inspiring examples of locally specific, multi-system responses between local governments, communities, public health organisation, and the voluntary sector. What remains from that effort, that could be put towards the current and future crises we will inevitably face? It was heartening, as a relatively new resident to Tunbridge Wells, that informal networks of neighbours and community groups stepped into the void. Yes, there was some panicked stockpiling of water – but people checked on vulnerable neighbours; offered water deliveries; stood in queues at the water station for others; shared tips on safe water usage; offered washing machine use, toilets or showers. As mum to a seven-month-old, local parent groups on WhatsApp and in person were a persistently brilliant source of support, problem solving, and careful information dissecting. Within my community, I saw muscle memory of how to act in a crisis. And my community is not alone – the same national preparedness survey found 62% of UK adults believing they were capable of taking action in a crisis, if they were supported with the right information and capacity to do so.
For the government, solving the UK’s essential infrastructure crisis requires innovation and financing – and tasking the new Office for Social Impact Investing, with their twin capacities of private and public sector financing, would be a good starting point. But we also need a national public strategy for community response in crisis. We need consistent resourcing and ministerial championship to make community resilience-planning a priority and a reality – not just modelling held by government or a working group. The South East Water failure may prompt a public enquiry – but we need to go further than seeing it as a one-off incident. Local government budgets are stretched and human capacity is all but exhausted, but the economic, human and health costs if we fail to prepare will far outweigh the budget needed to build our collective muscle to respond in a crisis. Just ask the residents of Tunbridge Wells.
Read our Community not catastrophe report, watch our short video explainer, and see what our poll reveals about what the UK public thinks of our crisis preparedness and response
Community needs and priorities COVID-19 Health and Wellbeing Local government and public services Systems change Posted on: 17 December 2025 Authors: Emily Morrison,