09/06/2026
🚧 WHY ARE YOUR UTILITIES FAILING YOU, AND WHY DOES NOBODY TAKE RESPONSIBILITY?
Roads dug up with no warning. Water supplies collapsing. Infrastructure crumbling while utility companies pay dividends to foreign shareholders. Housing targets imposed on communities that can't cope. And no one telling you what's going on.
I've put detailed proposals to Reform UK to fix the broken utility and infrastructure system in this country, and they have now been submitted to HQ for consideration in our manifesto. Labour won't fix it. The Conservatives created this mess. Only Reform UK will put community first.
One thing first. None of this is within the power of your county council to stop. The companies cause the disruption, and the rules that protect them are written in Westminster, not at County Hall.
Here's what's wrong and what I'm proposing we do about it 👇
❌ THE PROBLEMS
🔴 Utility companies have an automatic legal right to dig up your road, set by national law. KCC cannot refuse or block them. In Kent, utility closures nearly doubled from 6,604 to 10,296 in three years, and 29% are now classified as "emergencies."
🔴 When they finish, they only have to guarantee the repair for TWO YEARS. After that, YOU the taxpayer pay to fix the potholes they caused.
🔴 The same road gets dug up again and again by different companies weeks apart. There is no legal requirement to coordinate.
🔴 The first new reservoirs in England since 1992 were only approved in January 2025, and not one will supply a drop of water before 2036. Over thirty years of population growth with no new storage delivered.
🔴 Water failures are no longer a one-off. My own division has been hit by at least two water outages already this year. Across the county, 24,000 homes in Tunbridge Wells were left without water for up to 14 DAYS last December, after the Drinking Water Inspectorate had warned South East Water of a significant risk of failure at its Pembury treatment works. A second outage in January hit around 30,000 homes across Kent and Sussex, and the company then pulled out of a council meeting called to examine its failures. The CEO's pay? £400,000 a year. This is not a council failing. It is a private company that did not invest, backed by a regulator and a government that let it happen.
🔴 "Road Closed" signs appear with no information about where the closure actually starts, which junctions you can still use, or who is even doing the work. You only find out when you hit the cones.
🔴 There is no requirement to tell residents in advance. No requirement to tell you when it's finished. Council contact centres get overwhelmed with calls about works they did not cause and cannot control.
In June 2025 the cross-party Transport Select Committee published 12 recommendations to fix this. In September 2025 the Government rejected 9 of them: lane rental for all councils, a five-year repair guarantee in place of the current two, an independent Street Works Commissioner, and tougher statutory fines. KCC itself gave evidence to that inquiry and called for the definition of emergency works to be tightened. The county council is on the right side of this argument. It is the Government that has refused to act, and the Conservatives had 14 years before them and did nothing.
✅ MY PROPOSALS TO REFORM UK
🔵 Mandatory lane rental: charge utilities up to £2,500/day for occupying busy roads. Make it available to ALL councils, not just five.
🔵 Redefine "emergency" works to stop companies gaming the system. If they knew about the problem 48 hours in advance, it is not an emergency. Five times the standard fine for abuse.
🔵 Five-year reinstatement guarantee. You break it, you own it. Not two years. Five.
🔵 An English Street Works Commissioner: independent enforcement, like Scotland already has. Hold utilities AND councils to account.
🔵 A legal "Dig Once" rule. When a trench is open, all utilities with planned work must go in together. No more digging up the same road three times in six months.
🔵 50% public ownership / 50% UK pension fund ownership of utilities. End foreign shareholder profiteering and redirect revenues into the infrastructure they've neglected for decades. The people who own the pipes should be the people who use the pipes.
🔵 Mandatory digital signage at road closures with clear information: which roads are affected, which junctions are accessible, diversion routes, QR codes linking to live info. End the guessing game.
🔵 14-day advance notice to residents before planned works. A named contact. A post-completion notification when it's done.
🔵 Utility companies, not councils, must fund public information services during major works. They cause the disruption, they pay for the communication.
🔵 A statutory Infrastructure Capacity Test before housing targets are imposed. No building thousands of homes on roads and networks that are already failing.
These aren't wishful thinking. KCC has said the same in its own evidence to Parliament. The Transport Select Committee recommended most of them. Scotland already runs a version that works. The one reform even the Government conceded was worth consulting on was tightening the definition of emergency works, the exact abuse residents across my division keep reporting. I've submitted the full package to Reform UK HQ for consideration in our manifesto.
The disruption is caused by the utility companies. The failure to give councils the power to stop it sits with the Government. Labour and the Conservatives built this mess. Reform UK will clean it up.
Marc Logen
Kent County Councillor (Reform UK)
Sevenoaks North & Darent Valley
