Guildford: Thames Water face councillors on Storm Ciarán outage

Residents were given bottled when homes in Guildford and Godalming were left without water

Thames Water's spending on infrastructure has been described by a councillor as "woefully inadequate", and its behaviour "disgraceful".

The comments were made at a meeting where representatives from the company addressed Guildford councillors.

In November tens of thousands of homes in and around Guildford and Godalming were left without water in the wake of Storm Ciarán.

Company representatives said they were "committed to putting things right".

At the meeting on Wednesday, Thames Water's Tess Fayers acknowledged the huge disruption and apologised for all the those impacted including homes, businesses, hospitals and schools.

She said: "We are here because we are committed to putting things right. We want to make sure we do the right thing by the community and provide you with a constant supply of water."

'Bland' communication

Tillingbourne councillor Danielle Newson said: "Your infrastructure spending is woeful, completely inadequate.

"Telling us you can't actually tell us what you know is just disgraceful when we are paying your bills and your bonuses."

Ms Fayers admitted the firm's communications were "bland" and lacked technical information for customers.

Some 20,346 homes were cut off for more than three hours, and 14,520 for 12 hours or more.

So far Thames Water has paid out £1.7m in compensation to those impacted.

The utility company needed up to 16 tankers to prop up the network in order to feed water directly to cut off hospitals during the outage. 

It also delivered 750,000 litres of bottled water to customers described as "priority".

To improve matters, the meeting heard, an "enhanced" leadership team has been put in place and investment is being made, although capacity issues around Guildford complicate the matter.

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