UPDATE ON THE WATER SUPPLY ISSUES AND COMPENSATION

 

Updates on the water supply and compensation
from Keith Simmons, Eydon Parish Council Chairman

Our MP, Stuart Andrew, organised a meeting with representatives of 3 Parish Councils and representatives of Anglian Water.

This was primarily to discuss serious supply failures in our area and East Farndon and Clipston who lost their supply when we did in May but also recently in the VERY hot spell for a number of days.

The meeting addressed the issue of supply and resilience – I am pressing for a second supply line as originally promised in 2022/3, although they say this would not have stopped our recent outage. I am not convinced – as I believe supply was not lost at Crockwell Farm, and the Moreton Road was the proposed route for the second main.

The bottled water fiasco – both the vulnerable priority list and whole village delivery – a complete failure as far as I was concerned which gives little confidence in the reliability of the system. Excuses were made but no real ownership taken of the failure. If you think about it with such a vast geographic area and old infrastructure there must be these failures if not daily at least weekly! So why doesn’t their system work? I will continue to pursue this.

Compensation – we all believe we had NO supply for at the very least one period of 12 hours- £50 due to additional £40 for not paying within 20 days, minimum of £90. I read out the reply received by a resident – posted earlier on the Eydon Community Facebook page – which said they are re-evaluating whether payments are due on a property by property basis which will take another 30 days.

They seemed stunned by this but eventually agreed it was probably true, I immediately challenged them to how they are going to communicate this – they took this away. Incidentally some East Farndon residents had received payments – not all and it wasn’t clear why ! So maybe there are less avenues for them to dodge making payments under the revised 2025 compensation arrangements.

I asked them to arrange contact to me by a qualified expert to explain clearly how the monitoring and assessment testing is done for all properties in Eydon. They agreed – I will wait and see.

Remember,  previously for all the failures we suffered, around 12, they dodged individual compensation but made a goodwill gesture payment to the village via the Parish Council after sustained pressure from the Parish Council.

This meeting will be reconvened as part of an ongoing process and is not replacing  of a proposed meeting with the Chief Executive. I am pressing for a public meeting with him in the Village Hall.

Below are links to my earlier letter to Mark Thurston and his response – which really does not satisfy me.

So you can all see this matter is far from over and the Parish Council is working hard on your behalf.

 

Keith Simmons

Chairman Eydon Parish Council