Homes in High Wycombe lost access to water for over an hour this morning after Thames Water identified a ‘defective valve’ in the local pipe network.

Residents in the HP11 and HP12 parts of the town first reported a water outage after 7am today, Tuesday, October 15.

The disgraced water company apologised to locals in a statement posted to its website shortly afterwards, blaming the outage – which also caused low water pressure in some homes – on a “defective valve” which had “cut off supplies” to some parts of the network.

At 8:30am, a spokesperson for Thames Water said the valve had been “bypassed”, with supplies beginning to return across the affected area.

They warned that water pressure could take time to build up, allowing “up to two hours” for normal conditions to resume, and said they were “really sorry for the disruption (it had) caused”.