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:
- Water Security Atlas
- Half the world’s 100 largest cities are in high water stress areas
- Dramatic rise in water-related violence recorded since 2022
- Revealed: Europe’s water reserves drying up due to climate breakdown
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:
- Water firms across the south were repeatedly warned by regulators about supply risks (ITV)
- Water firms repeatedly warned by watchdog over supply risks (LBC)
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…
- England’s rivers ‘under threat’ as water extraction surges to record levels
- How England’s outdated water tracking system leaves regulators in the dark
- Environment Agency has nearly halved water-use inspections in last five years
- Environment Agency has ‘no idea’ how much water is taken, says whistleblower
- Water firms in England and Wales lost 1tn litres via leaky pipes in 2021
- Water shortages could derail UK’s net zero plans, study finds
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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