News 05/03/26

South East Water has been fined twenty two million pounds after repeated supply failures, according to the regulator Ofwat.

The watchdog began an investigation after a series of outages between November and January. Tens of thousands of households and businesses across Kent and Sussex were left without drinking water during that period. Ofwat says the penalty follows those repeated interruptions to supply which affected large numbers of customers and prompted the investigation into the company’s performance and reliability of service for homes and businesses across the region.

A majority in the United States Senate has blocked a resolution seeking to limit Donald Trump’s powers to continue the war against Iran without congressional approval.

Fifty three senators in the one hundred member chamber voted against advancing the bipartisan proposal. Meanwhile, a flight chartered by the UK government for British nationals wishing to leave Oman did not depart as planned. The aircraft had been due to leave the capital Muscat at 23:00 local time on Wednesday, which would have marked the first repatriation effort by the UK Foreign Office since the Middle East conflict began.

A nine year old boy suffered what has been described as fatal physical harm after he was operated on by a suspended surgeon at Addenbrooke’s Hospital.

Jack Moate died two months after surgery carried out in 2015 by Kuldeep Stohr. During the operation Jack suffered significant blood loss and afterwards was left in continuous pain. His mother, Elizabeth Moate, said the hospital sent her son home and that he later died in agony.

Doctors and families say a new drug is transforming the lives of children born with a severe form of epilepsy.

Dravet syndrome can cause dozens of dangerous seizures every day and affects around one in fifteen thousand babies. Without effective treatment the outlook can be devastating, with uncontrolled seizures placing children at high risk of injury and death. The drug, called zorevunersen, is given through an infusion into the spine and works by managing the underlying cause in most cases, a faulty gene affecting the brain.

Plans to expand Langley Health Centre have been approved after what planners describe as a struggle to provide primary care for its 23,500 patients with existing facilities.

The extension will create nine new consulting rooms, a waiting room and offices. The car park will also be reconfigured to add two more spaces. Planning documents say the centre is struggling to provide face to face appointments while administrative facilities are stretched and storage is being used in clinical rooms.

Dentists in England are returning hundreds of millions of pounds to the government for NHS care that has not been delivered.

More than nine hundred million pounds has been handed back over the past two years, about one pound in every seven paid to dentists. Many have prioritised private work instead. The figures help explain why many patients struggle to access NHS dentistry, with more than a fifth reporting difficulty getting care when they need it. The government says improvements are being made this year and any returned money is reinvested in services.