South East Water (SEW) has been given a penalty of almost £76,000 for taking millions of litres of water from the countryside without permission, the Environment Agency (EA) says.
The agency said for six weeks in 2021 the company illegally took more than 52 million litres (about 11.4 million gallons) from underground sources on a farm near Tonbridge in Kent, in a practice known as abstraction.
The company had not renewed its abstraction licence before the water, which was enough to fill 300,000 baths, was taken between May and June.
Nick Price, SEW’s head of water resources, said the issue was due to human error and it alerted the EA as soon as it became aware of the unlicensed abstraction.
