There were plenty of updates in 2025. Statements were issued. Web pages refreshed. Social feeds reissued.
What never arrived were the letters people were actually owed.
Not legal notices or carefully worded FAQs, but honest explanations. The kind that begin with “We should have told you sooner,” or “This was not a one-off,” or even the most disarming sentence of all: “This is on us.”
So here they are. The letters we should have got in 2025. Imagined, yes, but rooted firmly in what happened, what failed, and what was never adequately explained.
Letter One: About the River, the Rain, and the Ban
Dear Customers and River Users,
You were right to feel confused.
You watched rivers turn foul after heavy rain. You saw sewage warnings go up after swimmers and kayakers were already in the water. Then, days later, you were told not to use a hosepipe, even as rain continued to fall.
We discussed “exceptional weather” without explaining that our systems now rely on exceptions to function. Storm overflows were described as a last resort, but we did not say how often they had become routine. We discussed drought planning as if it existed separately from flooding, even though both are symptoms of the same stressed system.
We told you to “do your bit” because it was easier than explaining how much water is lost through leakage, how slowly reservoirs refill, or how infrastructure designed for a different climate now struggles to cope with either too much or too little water.
We did not state this clearly enough: rainfall does not equate to resilience. Local flooding does not fix the regional supply. And yes, some restrictions stayed in place because lifting them would have exposed just how fragile parts of the network had become.
You noticed the contradiction. You were not imagining it.
Sincerely,
Water Resources Planning
Residents of Tunbridge Wells went days with no water in 2025
Letter Two: About the Days the Tap Ran Dry
Dear Residents,
Five days without water is not a temporary inconvenience. It is a failure.
When the taps stopped working, we discussed a burst main and complex repairs. What we did not explain was how dependent some areas had become on single points of failure, or how thin our contingency planning really was once multiple things went wrong at once.
We were slower than we should have been to identify vulnerable households, not because the need was unclear, but because our data was fragmented and poorly used. Some care homes and medically vulnerable residents received support quickly. Others were missed entirely.
We relied heavily on bottled water because it was the fastest visible response, not because it was the most resilient one. We did not acknowledge that asking people to queue for basic water in a modern economy should have triggered a much deeper reckoning.
In some places, neighbours shared stored rainwater to flush toilets. That ingenuity was quietly praised but not reflected in planning discussions on decentralised storage or household resilience.
You adapted because you had to. You should not have needed to.
Yours,
Emergency Response Team
Letter Three: About the Money, the Silence, and the Trust Problem
Dear Bill Payers,
You noted the numbers and drew your own conclusions.
Bills rose. Executive pay held steady. Dividends were paid. Service failures were explained through performance metrics and regulatory language that rarely matched lived experience.
We said these things were not directly connected. On paper, that was true. In reality, it felt hollow. When rivers were polluted, taps ran dry, and restrictions tightened, the optics mattered, and we did not address them honestly.
At the same time, many of you stopped getting replies.
Emails went unanswered. Consultations were summarised without feedback. Updates arrived that contained no new information. Silence became a default response under pressure, shaped by legal caution and reputational fear.
But silence is not neutral. It is read as indifference, or evasion, or both. In 2025, it became part of the failure.
You were paying attention. We behaved as if you were not.
That misjudgement did more damage than any single incident.
Yours faithfully,
Corporate Affairs
What These Letters Tell Us About 2025
Together, these letters point to something more profound than isolated mistakes.
They reveal a water system struggling to speak honestly about its own limits, at a moment when the public is more informed, more connected, and less willing to accept contradiction without explanation.
Water in 2025 reminded us that trust erodes faster than infrastructure, and is harder to rebuild. That climate volatility exposes not just physical weakness, but communication habits shaped for calmer times.
People compared rainfall to restrictions, dividends to discharges, promises to outcomes. They noticed the gaps, and those gaps became the story.
What Has to Change in 2026
If these letters are ever to become real, a few shifts are unavoidable.
Communication must move from reassurance to explanation. Complexity is not the enemy. Evasion is.
Public understanding should be treated as an asset, not a risk. People can handle brutal truths when they are told plainly.
Resilience also needs to be visible, not buried in five-year plans. Leakage reduction, storage, and decentralised solutions should be core strategies, not optional extras.
Silence must no longer be the default under stress. In a water system under growing pressure, saying nothing is no longer safe. It actively corrodes trust.
These letters were never sent. But they could have been.
If 2026 is to be any different, something like them must be.
Because water is not just a service, it is a relationship. And relationships fail fastest when one side stops talking.
