South East Water has failed in its bid to cut a £75,859 penalty after it abstracted water from a Kent farm borehole without a valid licence for 47 days in 2021. Judge Harris dismissed the company’s appeal after a hearing at the First-tier Tribunal (General Regulatory Chamber, Environment).
The case centred on Lilley Farm in Tudeley, near Tonbridge, where South East Water held a licence to take water for public supply but that licence had expired on March 31, 2021. The tribunal decision says 52.3 million litres were taken unlicensed between May 4, 2021 and June 19, 2021, before a new licence was granted in March 2022.
South East Water said the lapse was caused by human error during a change in staffing and insisted it stopped the abstraction as soon as it learned of the problem. Nick Price said the company alerted the Environment Agency immediately, halted the activity until a new licence was in place and cooperated fully with the investigation. He also said the Environment Agency accepted that the unlicensed abstraction had no actual adverse impact on the environment and that it was within the parameters of both the expired licence and the later one.
The tribunal papers described the breakdown as a result of manual diary tracking, staff turnover and no handover notes, with employees meeting on May 18, 2021 after the lapse was flagged. South East Water said there was no automated process at the time to warn when a time-limited licence was close to expiry, but that it now uses automated checks and monthly management reports to catch any licence nearing its end. The company also argued the breach was a one-off administrative oversight during the Covid-19 pandemic and that the penalty was not proportionate.
Judge Harris rejected that argument and left the Environment Agency’s variable monetary penalty in place. The ruling confirms that the company took water without permission for weeks after its licence had expired, and that the fine will stand despite South East Water’s claim that the breach caused no environmental harm.
