'A lot of us are struggling' 58,000 homes high and dry as network fails again

"It feels awful," said Samantha Hargreaves as she trundled her bottle-laden trolley past queues of cars waiting for drinking water in an Asda car park.

- Ajit Niranjan

It was the second year in a row that her water supply had been cut off shortly before Christmas, and she was loading up her car with extra bottles for less mobile neighbours.

"There's quite a few of us who are struggling," said the 31-year-old community healthcare assistant.

Hargreaves is one of tens of thousands of people supplied by Southern Water in and around Southampton whose taps ran dry or lost pressure on Wednesday.

The ongoing outage, which hit 58,000 households in Hampshire after a fault at a supply works, came as the regulator Ofwat announced the region's bills would rise by more than anywhere else in England.

"I'm not worried about this," said Roger Brown, 67, pointing to the pallets of bottled water being unloaded in the car park as part of Southern's efforts to stem the crisis. "I'm more annoyed my water bills are going to go up."

Bills across England and Wales will rise over the next five years by an average of 36%; Southern Water customers will see them shoot up by 53%. The money, Ofwat says, is to be invested in projects that cut spills during storm overflows - a significant cause of the raw sewage dumps that have fouled England's waterways - as well as in meeting stricter environmental rules and building reservoirs to manage drought.

Ofwat said the proportion of customers who get help with their bills will rise from 4% to 9%.