HUNDREDS of residents in East Hampshire will be compensated following a power outage at the end of last month.

Residents in the Greatham, Liss and Alton areas are in line to receive a £75 “sorry” payment from the Scottish and Southern Electricity (SSE) networks after electricity went out between 2pm on Monday, July 23, and 5.19am the following day.

A fault on SSE’s overhead network meant 421 local customers were left without power.

“On the rare occasions there is a power cut, our priority is to restore our customers’ supplies as safely and as quickly as possible,” an SSE spokesman said on Tuesday.

“Our engineers were able to restore the supplies for 143 customers in around one hour by re-routing them to different parts of the network.

“Supplies to the remaining 278 customers were restored by 5.19am this morning.

“In line with Ofgem’s guaranteed standards, these 278 customers, who were off supply for longer than 12 hours, are eligible for £75 compensation and these payments have been processed today.

“We would like to apologise to our customers affected by this power cut and assure everyone that our engineers did all they could to restore supplies as safely and as quickly as possible.”