Southern Water's CEO said that actions are being taken to improve the company's response to help disabled and vulnerable customers after "poorly" serving those people in an outage in December.

The major outage at the end of 2024 left 58,000 homes without water, and vulnerable people were encouraged to sign up the company's Priority Service Register to receive water deliveries.

However, some customers, including a cancer patient who spoke to the Echo, were left without clean water for days, with some not receiving deliveries at all.

Lawrence Gosden, CEO, apologised when speaking after the outage in December.

Mr Gosden said: "Our more vulnerable customers – those on the Priority Services Register – were poorly served, having to wait too long for deliveries to arrive, and in some cases not receiving a delivery at all."

READ MORE: Southern Water CEO warns of 'small risk' of outages as works continue

But now in an exclusive interview with the Echo last week, the chief executive confirmed that improvements were being made.

Mr Gosden addressed that keeping up with the Priority Service Register was "one of the big challenges" of the December outage.

He said Southern Water saw the register "increase stratospherically" as the two-day outage progressed.

"It started at about four or five thousand and ended up at 20,000," Mr Gosden told the Echo.

"We hand deliver bottle water to vulnerable customers, and that hand delivery, at 20,000, that was just not possible to keep up with it."

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The Southern Water executive acknowledged that improvements were being made, specifying that things would be improved "next time round".

There remains a "small but elevated risk" of further outages while works are completed at the utility company's Testwood water supply plant for the next two to three years.

Mr Gosden said: "What we’re focusing on for next time round is increasing reliability of our bottled water supply from our manufacturers who provide the bottled water, because there were issues in that.

"But also, making sure that we have even more couriers available, who can then courier that water directly to those priority customers.

"They’re the big two learnings coming out."