Months Before the Stand-off, Tugendhat Told Ministers South East Water Couldn't Supply 13,000 of the Homes Required

This month, Tonbridge and Malling Borough Council and the Government have been at odds over the council's Local Plan: the council tried to pause it, the Government ordered it to carry on anyway, and the council's leader wrote back saying the order was a mistake. That fight didn't come out of nowhere. Back on 24 March, Tonbridge's MP, Tom Tugendhat, stood up in Parliament and laid out - in plain numbers - exactly the problem the council is still fighting about today: there isn't enough water for the homes the Government is demanding.

The Government wants Tonbridge and Malling to build 19,620 new homes by 2042. But South East Water, the company that supplies almost the whole borough, told the council in writing that it can only guarantee enough water for 6,318 of them. That's a gap of over 13,000 homes with nowhere for the water to come from.

Tugendhat didn't just assert this; he read the paper trail into the official record. In January, in the middle of that winter's water outages, the council's Cabinet Member for Infrastructure, Cllr Adem Mehmet, asked South East Water three straightforward questions: can you supply enough water for the housing target, will shortages get worse if it goes ahead anyway, and will your planned upgrades close the gap? The company's written answer, on 3 February, was no, yes, and no.

Council Leader Cllr Matt Boughton wrote to the Government about this on 16 January and again on 11 February. Tugendhat said the only response, on 12 February, came from a junior minister and "does not answer the question and does not mention South East Water's comments at all". He asked the Government to do one of two things: find more water, or lower the housing target. His own view was that only the second was realistic in the time available, and he asked for it to apply to neighbouring Sevenoaks district too, since it relies on the same water company for most of its area.

Fellow Kent Conservative Helen Whately, whose own Faversham and Mid Kent constituency has had similar water outages, backed his call. So did the DUP's Jim Shannon, who said the same thing was happening in Northern Ireland. The one note of caution came from Liberal Democrat Alison Bennett, who pointed out a real tension in the Government's own plan: fixing the water network is a long-term project, but the deadline for local housing plans is short. As she put it, the two timelines are "totally at odds with each other".

Responding for the Government, junior housing minister Miatta Fahnbulleh agreed the situation was "wholly unacceptable" and pointed to steps already under way: a taskforce holding water companies to account (South East Water's chief executive was due before it the following month), a new water reform Bill, and £104 billion of private investment going into the water industry over five years. She said the Government intends to make water companies statutory consultees earlier in the plan-making process, addressing the gap Tugendhat had raised. On his request for a meeting with him and the council, she said she would "take that suggestion away" and try to get it into the diary of Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook "as a priority".

The only real clash in the debate was over motive. Tugendhat argued it wasn't an accident - that the Government's own choices, cutting housing targets in cities like London while reclassifying protected land near towns and villages as buildable "grey belt", had shifted the pressure onto areas like his own, and he called that "a political choice". Fahnbulleh disagreed just as directly: "I do not believe that politics is being played here," she said, arguing the Government was simply trying to match housing numbers to where homes could actually be built, and that the underlying water problems had been building for well over a decade before her party took office. Neither side disputed that the situation itself was bad - just whose fault it was, and who should move first to fix it.

Whatever came of that promised meeting, it doesn't appear to have changed the outcome. Six months later, it was Pennycook - the minister Fahnbulleh named - who directed Tonbridge and Malling to press on with its Local Plan consultation the day after the council voted to pause it. Same numbers, same argument, now playing out as a formal stand-off instead of a debate in Westminster Hall. Sources: TheyWorkForYou / Hansard, HC Deb, 24 March 2026 and Tonbridge and Malling Borough Council