Revealed: how companies ‘secretly’ use billions of litres of public water in drought-hit England

As millions of people face hosepipe bans, many companies are not required to report, let alone cut, use of public supply.

Less than 1% of businesses in England use more water than the daily needs of 10 million people, as millions of households face hosepipe bans and three-quarters of the country is in drought.

Businesses across England use 2.6bn litres a day from the public water supply, which includes potable and non-potable water provided by water companies. In total, businesses account for about 30% of public supply use, with two-thirds of their consumption in water-stressed areas, according to Mosl, the organisation that operates England’s business water market.

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‘It’s Russian roulette’: alarm as Europe backs critical minerals mines in water-stressed regions

The European Commission plans to rewrite the EU’s flagship water protection law to speed up the development of critical minerals mines, despite many being located in drying and water-stressed regions, Watershed’s analysis has found.

Mining is a water-intensive industry, requiring large volumes of water for ore processing, dust suppression, waste management and mine dewatering. While modern projects recycle water, they still require significant amounts, and in water-stressed regions those demands can add to pressure on already stretched rivers, aquifers and water supplies.

Analysis and mapping by Watershed Investigations, shared with the Guardian, found that more than half of the 33 planned new or expanded mines designated as “strategic projects” under the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act are located in areas that have been drying over the past two decades, according to Nasa satellite data.

‘Drinking from a fetid pond’: superbug-creating genes found in UK’s largest lake

Watershed detected genes capable of creating antibiotic-resistant superbugs in the UK’s largest lake, which supplies drinking water to about 40% of Northern Ireland.

Our testing of water from Lough Neagh, which has a surface area 26 times bigger than Windermere, found genes resistant to a wide range of antibiotics, including carbapenems – drugs reserved for life-threatening infections when all other treatments have failed.

The discovery comes as deaths linked to antibiotic-resistant infections are rising worldwide. Nearly 400 resistant infections are reported each week in England, with deaths linked to them reaching an estimated 2,379 in 2024, according to UK Health Security Agency data.

The World Health Organization (WHO) describes this antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as “one of the most urgent, complex and frightening health challenges of our time”.

The article was published in the Guardian: 

Watershed spoke about the findings on BBC R4’s Rare Earth and BBC Northern Ireland’s The Nolan Show.

Who’s in control of our water supplies?

Rachel Salvidge

Who’s in charge? Is anyone driving this bus? I can’t shake the feeling that everyone thinks someone else is in control, while we freewheel towards catastrophe.

Not least because we’re entering a global era of ‘water bankruptcy’, according to the UN. Water-related violence is spiking. Most big cities now sit in high water stress regions. Large swathes of Europe are drying out. I’ve written about all this and mapped it on a new Water Security Atlas: 

Back home, things aren’t much better. Taps ran dry at one end of the country last month, while at the other people did backstroke in their kitchens. On the very edges some people’s actual houses fell into the actual sea. 

Ergo, someone’s not got a handle on water supplies, despite all the demand forecasts. Someone else can’t predict the floods that have been in climate projections for decades. And someone’s been studiously ignoring coastal erosion, despite it being as reliable as the tides. 

Successive governments and regulators were supposed to make sure this rainy island has enough water to avoid shortages. They were supposed to prevent profiteering private interests from treating our rivers like open sewers. They were supposed to defend us from floods or at least help us get out of the way. 

It doesn’t seem to be going so well. 

I’ve examined the water supply situation and it appears regulators don’t have a clear grip on who’s using what. Worse still, they’ve known for years that many of England’s water companies aren’t doing enough to secure our drinking water into the future.

Smash cut to the people of Kent and Sussex: taps dry, blood boiling, swearing at water tankers in the streets. 

These events were foretold and promptly foreignored, as I’ve set out in a number of articles. The most recent show that the Government, Environment Agency and Ofwat had warned South East Water about its supplies years before the recent outages. 

And it’s not the only water company that has been warned about supply risks. Far from it: 

Overall, management of water supplies looks iffy. I found this repeatedly while reporting a series of Guardian investigations — particularly because the system is so patchy and opaque that it’s difficult to determine who is using what, and therefore almost impossible to control the resource. Here’s what I found…

Moves are afoot, though. The government has laid a Water White Paper before Parliament, promising to do better. There is some good stuff in it but not enough about preventing pollution, and not enough about bringing the water sector properly into line.

The paper says the government is considering changes to how abstraction (taking water from the environment) is managed. That reform is critical if we’re ever to get a proper grip on supplies. But it’s also been promised for as long as I’ve been a journalist. Which is a long time.

So for now, we trundle on, driverless, towards the gorge. The only question is whether there will be any water at the bottom of it.

rachel.salvidge@watershedinvestigations.com

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Dramatic rise in water-related violence

Water-related violence has almost doubled since 2022 and little is being done to understand and address the trend and prevent new and escalating risks, experts have said. There were 419 incidents of water-related violence recorded in 2024, up from 235 in 2022, according to the Pacific Institute, a US-based thinktank. The institute has compiled evidence of hundreds of years of water-related conflicts, including cases of water being a trigger for violence, a weapon of conflict or a casualty of conflict

Watershed mapped the flashpoints: https://watershedinvestigations.com/find-out-whats-polluting-your-local-rivers-lakes-and-coast/

Water companies warned of problems years before supply outages

South East Water was warned of supply problems years before the taps ran dry, Watershed revealed. Regulators repeatedly told the company it did not have enough water to meet demand in two areas that lost supplies.

It was among many water companies that were warned by Defra, Ofwat and the Environment Agency about supplies and leakage. Watershed secured coverage in The Times, on ITV News and LBC, and on Yahoo News and local media.

Half the world’s 100 largest cities are in high water stress areas

Half the world’s 100 largest cities are experiencing high levels of water stress, with 38 of these sitting in regions of “extremely high water stress”, new analysis and mapping has shown.

Water stress means that water withdrawals for public water supply and industry are close to exceeding available supplies, often caused by poor management of water resources exacerbated by climate breakdown.

Watershed Investigations and the Guardian mapped cities on to stressed catchments revealing that Beijing, New York, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro and Delhi are among those facing extreme stress, while London, Bangkok and Jakarta are classed as being highly stressed.

Separate analysis of Nasa satellite data, compiled by scientists at University College London, shows which of the largest 100 cities have been drying or getting wetter over two decades with places such as Chennai, Tehran and Zhengzhou showing strong drying trends and Tokyo, Lagos and Kampala showing strong wetting trends. All 100 cities and their trends can be viewed on Watershed’s interactive water security atlas.

UK’s largest proposed datacentre ‘understating planned water use’

The UK’s largest proposed datacentre is understating the scale of its planned water use by a factor of 50, according to our analysis.

How close is Day Zero?

Rachel Salvidge

Could we run out of water? “People would be shocked if they knew just how close we’ve come to Day Zero in England,” a former Environment Agency officer told me some time ago.

Day Zero, sometimes known as the Jaws of Death by those numb to melodrama, is the time when a city or country runs out of drinking water. When the taps run dry and the standpipes or tankers are deployed. To be fair, it is quite a dramatic scenario.

To many on this damp little island that regularly floods, the idea’s preposterous. But it’s a very real threat in parts of the UK and Europe. The Environment Agency for England has warned of widespread drought next year unless there’s lots of rain over the winter and so far, it’s not looking good.

I wanted to understand what’s happening to freshwater supplies across the UK and the wider continent, to our rivers, lakes and groundwater. Groundwater (aquifers) are generally thought to be more resilient to climate change but I wanted to know how they were holding up. 

Fortunately NASA’s GRACE satellites have been orbiting the Earth for decades, and by observing changes in the gravity field, can estimate changes in the amount of water stored in a region. And more fortunately, I know some clever people who can make sense of that data. 

Working with Professor Mohammad Shamsuduhha and postdoctoral researcher Arifin, we could see stark drying and wetting trends across the UK and the continent and mapped them, revealing huge regions with shrinking water resources while others in the north look to be getting wetter, both outcomes having far reaching consequences for people, agriculture, wildlife and wider industry. 

The map and story was published in the Guardian at the weekend: 

I followed this up with a second story revealing that tensions are rising between the government, regulators and the water industry as the Environment Agency warns of a possible nationwide drought next year. Each blames the other for not factoring increasing volumes of water needed for industrial growth, including clean energy needed to hit carbon emissions reduction targets. The omission could lead to water shortages in some regions, according to new analysis.

Read more about the scrap here: 

My previous stories have revealed that it’s not clear that anyone in government or elsewhere has a handle on how much water is being taken from the environment at any one time. There are systems in place but they are patchy and disjointed and often rely on self reporting. 

I’ve also found that the Environment Agency, the regulator responsible for overseeing water taken directly from rivers and groundwater, rarely checks up on users to make sure they aren’t taking more than their licensed amount, according to whistleblowers. When you add that to the fact that the water sector loses eye-watering amounts from its creaking systems every day, the picture starts to look pretty shambolic.

Today there are flood warnings in some parts of the UK while others remain water stressed. It’s clear we need to be managing water better and it’s critical that at the very minimum we need to know who’s using what. 

Watershed is a non-profit organisation. If you value this kind of work, please consider donating so we can do more of it: https://watershedinvestigations.com/support-us/

rachel.salvidge@watershedinvestigations.com

Water shortages could derail UK’s net zero plans

Tensions are growing between the government, the water sector and its regulators over the management of England’s water supplies, as the Environment Agency warns of a potential widespread drought next year.

Research commissioned by a water retailer has found water scarcity could hamper the UK’s ability to reach its net zero targets, and that industrial growth could push some areas of the country into water shortages.