England has just recorded its driest July since records began in 1836. Fast forward to 2053 and we could be living in a “dystopian hellscape”, said Patrick Galbraith, environment correspondent, in The Telegraph. Rivers running dry, water being turned off at the mains, and food “poised to be rationed”: “this is not science fiction, but a very realistic scenario for the UK”.
Nearly three-quarters of England has been declared in drought, with around 45 million people now living in a drought area, and more than 27 million facing water-use restrictions. Nowhere in England is now under a ‘normal’ status.
Problems concerning infrastructure, investment, distribution and regulation have all compounded the effects of Britain’s scorching summer, forcing the government to consider its plans for a water crisis more carefully.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Latest Videos FromThe Week
In 2053, Britain is expected to have a shortfall of five billion litres of water per day, according to Baroness Brown, from the government’s advisory Climate Change Committee. If it materialises, this deficit would have “devastating” consequences for food supplies “as well as the economy and social cohesion”, said Galbraith. “The dystopian future of 2053 may not be so far away.”
The “main problem” in our water crisis is regulation, said Emma Duncan in The Times. Water regulators in Britain have indeed kept bills down, but have allowed water companies to give “massive bonuses to bosses and to shovel vast sums to shareholders”. Around “£50 billion” has been paid in dividends in the three decades since privatisation, “rather than spending the money on necessary upgrades to water-treatment works and pipes”.
Jon Cunliffe’s recent review of the water sector produced “sensible” recommendations, arguing principally that the industry’s “disparate regulators be brought together” and so “attracting new capital into the industry”. The whole point of regulation is to “act in the interest of citizens” and ensure water companies are “preventing pollution and ensuring future supplies”.
“Without investment and reductions in our water use, we are facing a serious problem,” said Pippa Neill and Safeerah Ahmed in The Guardian. For “several decades” now, the main issues have been “fixing leaks and building new reservoirs”, meaning there is not only a problem of “storing water during times of plenty”, but also effective distribution when water is needed.
No major new reservoirs have been built in England and Wales since 1992, and research from Greenpeace UK found that 2.87 billion litres of water a day is wasted through leaky pipes in England and Wales: “enough to fill 1,150 Olympic-sized swimming pools and amounting to a fifth of all water pumped through the network”.
To fix the issue, water companies have committed to “record investment” to minimise leaks, and “several” new reservoirs are in the planning stage.
What next?
The UK already has “disaster planning scenarios in place for a severe drought”, said Galbraith in The Telegraph. The government’s Emergency Drought Order, if invoked, would force water companies to “implement rolling water-rationing across entire regions by cutting off people’s taps”. Rationed water would then be distributed from standpipes in central collection points. In this scenario, private customers buying water would “only have 20 litres of water per person per day”: or a “mere 14% of our current average usage”.
Alongside water rationing, repeated droughts would also “increase the risk of fire, with less water for firefighters to battle blazes”, said Joe Duggan in The i Paper.
The UK’s National Risk Register, which outlines the “most serious threats facing the country”, states that under a “reasonable worst-case scenario” of continuous dry weather patterns, “large swathes of South and East of England would be hit by severe drought”. Transport, hospitals, data centres, emergency services and telecommunications businesses would all be hit with restrictions.
Perhaps most concerningly, the document also considers the “potential changes in public behaviour including the potential for localised civil disorder”.
