Britain is getting wetter – so why are there hosepipe bans?

“If heatwaves are climate change’s swift and deadly invasion troops, then drought is its slow but crippling undercover agent,” said India Bourke in The New Statesman. Last month, England chalked up its hottest day on record; it was also its driest July since 1935. And with a new heatwave under way this week, an official drought declaration was predicted to be imminent. Rivers are “perilously low”; farmers are worried about a re-run of the 1976 drought, when crops failed and food prices rose by 12%, and a growing number of water companies have introduced hosepipe bans, or are planning to. Stand by for more brown lawns and empty swimming pools.

I’m confused, said David Frost in The Daily Telegraph. Why are consumers being urged to curb their demand, when surely the solution is to fix the supply? Met Office data shows that we have enough water: if anything the UK is getting wetter. The problems lie in timing – we get more rain in winter but less in summer; and locality – the south of England is drier. With investment in storage, distribution and conversion facilities these problems could be overcome; but we last built a reservoir 30 years ago, and the Thames Water desalination plant in east London (which turns salt water into fresh) is lying idle.

The water companies have much to answer for, said The Times. Customer bills have soared since privatisation, yet instead of investing in infrastructure and fixing pipes (a whopping 20% of the UK’s water supply is lost to leaks), the sector has paid out £72bn to private shareholders and piled £56bn of debt on its balance sheet.

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If companies are to change their behaviour, they’re going to need clearer direction from government, said India Bourke. The directives to which they’re subject at present are contradictory: they’re told they must extract less water from rivers in the interests of conservation and reduce their carbon footprint; but at the same time they’re told to build new reservoirs and other infrastructure projects that use up huge amounts of energy. We consumers need more direction too – on installing aerated taps to improve efficiency, for example, or using butts to collect rainwater for use in the garden.

Yet to focus solely on domestic conservation and supply would be short-sighted, said Donnachadh McCarthy on The Independent. We should also look at water consumption by energy producers. Across Europe, energy production accounts for fully 44% of water usage. A switch to renewables would improve this, but the Government is planning to construct up to eight new “water-guzzling” nuclear plants. To run just one of them, Sizewell C, will require two million litres of portable water a day; but it lies in Suffolk, one of the driest parts of the country, and no one seems to have worked out where this water will come from. As water supplies “get increasingly stressed” and Britain gets increasingly parched, we’re all going to have to start changing our long-term thinking.