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The boss of the company that has left thousands of households in Kent and East Sussex without water for days is in line for a £400,000 long-term bonus regardless of his performance, if he resists calls for him to resign over the outages.
David Hinton, the chief executive of South East Water, is to receive the payout if he stays on until July 2030.
Hinton is facing calls to give up his right to the previously unreported “service award”. The payment, which was disclosed in the company’s annual report, is not performance-related, meaning that as long as he remains, Hinton will receive it whatever the company’s record on water supplies or pollution.
South East Water has faced immense pressure after 30,000 households in Kent and East Sussex endured days of water supply failures in November and again in January.
The environment secretary, Emma Reynolds, on Wednesday called on the regulator Ofwat to review the company’s licence to operate. On Thursday, Ofwat confirmed it had launched an investigation into whether South East Water had “complied with its obligation to provide high standards of customer service and support for its customers”.
The outage has forced many of the affected households in the Tunbridge Wells area to pick up bottled water from makeshift distribution centres and travel out of the area to wash and use flushing toilets. On Thursday, the company said taps “should be flowing as normal” for 2,000 people in Tonbridge and surrounding villages.
The crisis has thrust the spotlight on to Hinton – who has run the company since 2020 – with several MPs calling for him to resign or refuse his bonus for the current financial year. Hinton received £457,000 in the year to June 2025, including a £115,000 bonus.
However, a 30% base salary increase, to £400,000, plus two new payments mean he is on track to receive more than that this year – even if he were to receive no performance-related bonus. Hinton is in line to receive £565,000 in fixed pay this financial year, if the service award is divided equally over the five-year period.
The first payment is a “service award”, worth another £400,000 if Hinton stays until July 2030 – a rate of £80,000 a year. If he is still in the job he will receive the first £80,000 in July 2028, the same the following July and another £240,000 in July 2030.
In addition, South East Water also awarded Hinton £50,000 in extra pay, described as a “cash allowance”, to compensate him for extra hours related to an appeal to the Competition and Markets Authority to allow bills to be raise even higher. Other water companies that have appealed do not appear to have awarded extra pay for carrying out the appeal, which is often part of the standard process in the five-yearly reviews.
South East’s chief financial officer, Andrew Farmer, and other unnamed senior executives will also be eligible for similar payments.
Mike Martin, the Liberal Democrat MP for Tunbridge Wells, said: “Dave Hinton’s salary and bonuses are wild. He should be ashamed. Try giving us water first, then let’s talk about the money.”
Martin added that all bonuses should be performance-related. “Obviously bonuses should be related to performance otherwise they would be called salary,” the MP said.
Gary Carter, a national officer at the GMB union, said: “It really adds insult to injury to reward the very person ultimately responsible for failing customers – whilst simultaneously increasing their bills.
“If David Hinton had a shred of decency, he would hand this money back.”
Last week, before the latest outages, Hinton told MPs on the environment, food and rural affairs committee that he did not want a focus on his bonus and pay during an earlier water crisis in December. He said this was why he had not done media interviews about the water shortages.
He has also not given interviews as the latest crisis has unfolded, but the company said he was “absolutely working as hard as everybody else behind the scenes”.
However, Hinton acknowledged that his performance-related bonus could be docked this year as a result of the water shortages.
He said: “There are different elements to the bonus. For example, health and safety is one element, and a whole load of the elements are on water supply, and I do not expect to get a bonus on either of those elements.”
Paddy Goffey, a researcher at the High Pay Centre, a campaign group, said the extra payments appeared to be “a novel form of compensation package”.
“Guaranteed service awards of this kind are not common, and executives are typically rewarded through base pay and performance-related incentives based on a range of metrics,” he said. The extra payments appeared to be “rewarding substandard performance and a poor quality of service for customers, while also removing accountability for this”, Goffey added.
A spokesperson for the company said: “South East Water remains committed to a remuneration framework that supports a performance culture, and recognises success but does not reward poor performance.
“The bonus scheme is evaluated by the company’s independent non-executive director-led remuneration committee. The executive directors are not part of this committee and have no say in their remuneration.
“The bonus scheme is made up of multiple elements, including health and safety factors, an environment programme, and staff engagement. We can confirm that no bonus payment was made for operational performance for the year 2024-25.”
