South East Water
British water utility servicing Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire and Berkshire
South East Water is a British water utility providing drinking water services to households across Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire and Berkshire. South East Water is a private limited company registered in England and Wales owned by parent company, HDF (UK) Holdings Limited. The company's shareholders are Utilities Trust of Australia, which owns 50 per cent, as well as the NatWest pension fund and Desjardins, both of which have a 25 per cent stake each.
According to the company, it supplies on average 521 million litres of drinking water per day and operates 83 water treatment works and 14,500 kilometres of its water mains across an area of 5,657 square kilometres. The company takes water from rivers, reservoirs at Ardingly and Arlington, and underground sources (aquifers) under abstraction licences issued by the Environment Agency.
History
The present company came into existence in December 2007 by a merger of Mid Kent Water and an earlier separate company with the name of South East Water, thus uniting two water companies in the South East of England.
Other companies that had earlier been merged into the current company included Mid-Sussex Water Company, the Crowborough District Water Company, the Newhaven and Seaford Water Company, the Eastbourne Water Company (itself incorporating the Hailsham Water Company), the West Kent Water Company, the Mid Southern Water Company (formerly the Mid-Wessex Water Company; itself incorporating the Aldershot Gas and Water Company, the Frimley and Farnborough District Water Company, the Wokingham District Water Company, the Herriard and Lasham Water Company, the Manydown Estate Waterworks, the Hartley Wintney Waterworks, and the Maidenhead Waterworks Company), and the Burgess Hill Water Company.
The Mid Kent Water Company had been originally incorporated as an ordinary limited company in 1888, before being reincorporated by the Mid Kent Water Act 1898 (61 & 62 Vict. c. ccxxiii) as a statutory company.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “South East Water” is british water utility servicing Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire and Berkshire. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through South, East and Water, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7567143. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2007, 1888 and 1898.
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This entry incorporates text from “South East Water” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.