Why is Britain not better prepared for this drought?

Editorial: Our water resources are creaking – the government must step in

(Dave Brown)

The declaration of drought in parts of England has shone a light on the woeful lack of government planning for such an eventuality.

Extreme weather because of the growing climate crisis is sadly no longer a new phenomenon, and so this very dry summer should hardly have come as a surprise. Indeed, the government’s Climate Change Committee has been banging the drum about its inevitability.

In 2018, the Commons environmental audit committee criticised the government for diluting its water efficiency ambitions and called for a “water-saving culture” because the climate crisis is speeding up the frequency and severity of heatwaves.

About 20 per cent of the mains water supply is lost through leaks in the system, a long-standing problem. According to the National Infrastructure Commission, an extra four billion litres of water per day will be needed in England by 2050 to avoid extreme drought. There is a one in four chance of a serious drought by then.

As is usual when a problem hits the headlines and unpopular restrictions such as hosepipe bans are introduced, there is much finger-pointing. Tory politicians are urging water companies, which they created as private monopolies during the Thatcher era, to do more to plug the leaks and want Ofwat, the industry regulator, to take a tougher line. One in four companies is not hitting targets for identifying and fixing leaks. The firms are also rightly under fire for discharging sewage into rivers and the sea.

Predictably, the Tory leadership contenders are among those demanding action. Ms Truss, a former environment secretary, said: “My view is that we should be tougher on the water companies and that there hasn’t been enough action to deal with these leaky pipes which have been there for years … those companies need to be held to account.”

Mr Sunak added: “For too long, water hasn’t had the attention that it deserves … we need to make sure that measures to boost resilience to extreme weather conditions are part of our holistic plan for water – to protect its supply and clean it up.”

Ms Truss, Mr Sunak and their Tory colleagues should have given the industry more attention over the past 12 years. It is true that the regulations should be enforced more effectively. Ofwat has completed only seven enforcement cases against water companies since 2014; just one related to a failure to prevent leaks.

Thames Water was fined £8.55m, the maximum penalty, in a year in which it made a pre-tax profit of £511m.

It is easier for ministers to pass the buck than debate the urgent need for much better resilience planning across the piece. In the case of water, that will require building more reservoirs, allowing more supplies to be transferred from one region to another, and more water recycling facilities.

An opportunity will arise later this year, when the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is due to finalise the national policy statement for water resources infrastructure. Farmers, badly hit by the current emergency, should be helped to invest in water storage and management and drought prevention measures. The cost of inaction would be a bill of about £40bn over the next 30 years for emergency maintenance and water supplies.

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Our politicians need to widen their horizons beyond the short term and the next general election. The lack of planning for a pandemic was exposed by Covid-19. The closure of the UK’s biggest natural gas storage site in 2017 was clearly a mistake; it is now being partially reopened.

The new prime minister must learn from past mistakes. They should encourage Ofwat to go further in monitoring the water companies’ balance sheets. There can be no repeat of what happened at Thames Water, the largest in the sector, whose owners extracted more than £3bn in dividends in a decade, leaving its London super-sewer to be financed by customers.

The new prime minister should encourage an honest debate on how the much-needed investment should be funded, and on the balance between taxpayers and customers. It will be tempting in a cost of living crisis to continue to keep customers’ bills as low as possible. But such an approach makes it more profitable for the companies to extract more water than carry out the vital investment needed to plug the leaks.

Water isn’t working. It is time the government ensures it does.