Southern Water has notched up the most written complaints of any water company in the country for the fifth year in a row.

This is despite the number of complaints going down in the year 2016-17 to 8,733 from 2015-16's figure of 15,797 - an improvement of 45%.

The water utility watchdog, the Consumer Council for Water (CCW), says Southern Water has a lot more work to do to curb the number of complaints that it receives.

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Although the council is encouraged by the improvement, it doesn't go far enough according to its London and South East Chairman.

Sir Tony Redmond said: "We are encouraged by Southern's improvement but its performance remains poor in comparison to the rest of the industry.

"There is a lot more work to be done by the company."

Meanwhile, Southern Water's chief customer officer, Simon Oates, has said the firm's teams have worked hard to get to this point.

Mr Oates said: "I am pleased we are the most improved company across the industry in terms of achieving the largest reduction in written complaints.

"Despite this 45% reduction we are still at the foot of the industry league tables, so we'll continue to work closely with our colleagues at CCW to drive forward further improvements and move up the rankings.

"Our teams have worked so hard over the last year and we are all committed to continuing to improve responsiveness and focus more on meeting the individual needs of our customers.

"We've carried out a thorough review to ensure we can make it easier to do business with us - whether it's online, face-to-face or over the phone.

"This includes making significant improvements to our website and customer contact centre.

"We want to reassure our customers we're building on the significant improvements we have already made, and bringing our performance up to the standard they quite rightly expect from us."

The company has put a number of measures in place to help make customer's experiences better including launching a new online services portal which helps to make it easier for customers to manage their account.

Two other companies operating in the county also saw reductions in complaints - Affinity Water, which serves parts of east Kent, by 21% - and South East Water by 30%.