Turning the taps off: are water restrictions the new normal?

The English summer has reached its increasingly customary drought-warning moment and, as the first hosepipe ban starts in Yorkshire this morning, police have urged people not to dial 999 if they see someone turning the sprinkler on.

But beyond snitching neighbours and browning lawns, there are serious concerns that water restrictions could become much more common in the UK, with the Environment Agency forecasting a potential five-billion-litre-a-day shortfall in public water supplies by 2055.

What did the commentators say?

Hosepipe bans are always unpopular but, this year, public anger at leaky pipes and water company mismanagement has raised the temperature up a notch. Despite the £1,000 fine for defying the ban, one Yorkshire local told Metro he would still be filling up his grandchildren's paddling pool and would "argue the case" against any punishment that came his way. "I pay for a service," he told the paper, "and if they can't supply it, then cut my bills down."

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Other locals told the BBC they're "frustrated" to face water restrictions while so many pipe leaks seem to go unchecked. "It's literally going out of that hole and straight into a drain," said one, pointing at water she claimed had been pouring from a leak for two weeks.

Nationwide "mismanagement" of the water system in a era of rising temperatures has triggered "growing concerns over water scarcity" in the UK, said Richard Vaughan in The i Paper. In fact, at the time of the general election last year, "this country was looking at water rationing within 10 years because there wasn't enough water to meet the demands of our population", Environment Secretary Steve Reed told Vaughan.

After the election, additional funding was secured to "build the necessary infrastructure" to help prevent rationing in future. But now the artificial intelligence boom is causing new problems.

Most AI datacentres use large amounts of water from public supplies to cool their servers but they don't have to report to the Environment Agency how much they are using or projecting to use in the future. As a result, we have "no idea" how much water England will be short of in future decades, said Helena Horton, environment reporter at The Guardian.

"The nation’s water resources are under huge and steadily increasing pressure," said Environment Agency chair Alan Lovell. We urgently need to "tackle these challenges head-on" to "preserve this precious resource and our current way of life".

What next?

South East Water has already announced it will be imposing a hosepipe ban from July 18 on its 1.4 million customers in Kent and Sussex. And there might be more bans on the way: Southern Water, which covers most of southeast England, told ITV News that it's "monitoring the situation in the areas it supplies", and Thames Water has said it will issue a ban unless the current water-shortage situation "changes significantly".

If you find yourself in a hosepipe ban area, you shouldn't "snitch" on anyone breaking the rules, said etiquette expert and "Gogglebox" star Mary Killen in The Spectator in 2022. And "don't lay yourself open to being snitched upon", because a "lifelong feud" with a neighbour is "many times worse than a temporary drought".