How Britain found itself running out of water (even if we feel like it rains too much)

Telegraph

16-05-2025

The footpath winds through the Hampshire woodlands, peaceful and still on a warm sunny day in May. Wasps dart between the vegetation. It's a quiet spot, hidden between the low-rise flats on one side and, on the other, something altogether more dramatic: a vast site that resembles a shallow open quarry. It is in fact a new reservoir, or it will be eventually. For now, it's a scene of brown and red earth, from which rises up an occasional sandy-coloured mound. Yellow diggers crawl to and fro in the distance.
While Britain has seen marked demographic change in recent decades, Havant Thicket Reservoir, currently under construction, is the first major reservoir to be built in the country since 1992.
On the metal fencing that keeps the public out, a sign says Future Water. It's the name of the company building the project, but it's also the aspiration behind it, which is to safeguard water resources for the South East for years to come.
If it sounds reassuring – because who doesn't want their water resources safeguarded? – this industrious picture of forward-thinking is overshadowed by a more worrying reality. Although we're all certain we live on a rain-drenched island, Britain is, in fact, running out of water.
This has been the message in recent years, however much we see ourselves as a drizzly country full of puddles and umbrellas, and however extensive and colourful our vocabulary is for damp weather.
What damp weather, asks one water company? South-east England is drier than 'Sydney, Dallas, Marrakesh and Istanbul,' Tim Mcmahon, managing director of Southern Water, said earlier this month.
'We need to reduce customers' usage,' Mcmahon told the BBC. 'Otherwise we will have to put other investments in place, which will not be good for our customers and might not be the best thing for the environment,' he added ominously, without offering further details.
The company is building the Havant Thicket Reservoir in tandem with Portsmouth Water, with a provisional opening date of 2029. But, alone, it won't be a silver bullet to solve Britain's water crisis, which has been in the works for a number of years. By 2050, England is facing a shortfall of nearly five billion litres of water per day, according to the Government.
So how, in this land of showers and downpours, where it spits and it pours and it floods, did we end up here? The first answer comes back to what Mcmahon said: that we're actually not as deluged as we think, not currently.
This year has seen the driest start to spring since 1956, the Environment Agency said earlier this month. March was the driest since 1961 and in April many areas received less than half their normal rainfall. While the wet winter boosted groundwater levels, they are expected to continue to decline in most areas, according to the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology.
Our climate is changing, with the UK set for wetter winters but drier summers in the future, according to the Met Office.
But the weather's not the only issue. 'We are all using more water than we used to,' says Nicci Russell, chief executive of the campaign group Waterwise.
In the past 60 years, personal water use has more or less doubled to around 140 litres per day, she says. 'That's due to changes in how we use water. When I was little, we had one bath for the family once a week. Now we all shower regularly, we use sprinklers and so on, so we're all using more. The climate emergency means there's less water available when we need it, and you can't magically create new water.'
Then there's demographic change to factor in. Since the Victorians built their water network, the UK's population has grown enormously, from around 40 million in 1898 to an estimated 67.6 million by 2022. It is projected to reach 70 million by next year, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The legacy of our Victorian infrastructure has been blamed for some of our current problems, and in 2023 Thames Water started replacing 70 miles of leaky pipes across London and the Home Counties that dated from the 19th century at a cost of £700 million.
'The Victorian stuff was built really well but it's old,' says Phil Clisham, a specialist adviser to the Institution of Civil Engineers on water and sewage infrastructure. 'Not enough has been spent maintaining the buried infrastructure. If we maintained current levels of expenditure it would take over a thousand years to replace the sewers.'
Meanwhile, reservoirs have been closed in recent years – in some cases because they had reached the end of their working lives, and in some, apparently, to save money – but they have not been replaced. '[S]everal of our water companies preferred to build houses on some of their reservoirs,' Andrew Sells, former chairman of Natural England, wrote in The Telegraph in 2022.
There are more than a dozen new reservoirs planned for the next 15 years, but building them isn't always easy. It has been almost two decades since Thames Water first proposed a new reservoir near Abingdon in Oxfordshire. Today opposition to the plans – which the company says are 'crucial to securing future water supply' for its millions of customers – continues to rumble on. Campaigners against the project warn of 'massive' environmental and carbon costs.
'There's a lot of resistance to building reservoirs and new pipelines,' says Clisham. 'People don't like change, we get that, but we have to do this for the good of the nation as a whole.'
This week, Thames Water boss Chris Weston admitted he was 'not confident that we won't have to restrict usage' this year, depending on the weather and how much rainfall there is between now and the summer.
At the same time, it transpires that Britain's only water desalination plant will spend another summer not in use. The £250 million Thames Water facility in Beckton, East London, paid for by household bills, is meant to provide fresh drinking water but has rarely been switched on in its 15-year existence. The company said it was currently focusing instead on 'essential operational upgrades' required in the area.
Convincing the public of the need to cut back may prove a challenge, meanwhile. Already fed up with the repeated pollution of their rivers and seawater with sewage while bills continue to rise, many don't seem in the mood to listen.
As the sun blazed down in Arundel, West Sussex, this week, Southern Water customers were ambivalent about the latest warning from their water provider that usage would have to be reduced.
'The way I see it is I pay for my water,' says Mike White from behind the counter in the local butcher's shop. 'We use what we have to.'
Others point out with exasperation that this call for them to cut back has come at a time when bills are soaring. Luke, a doctor in his early 40s with two young children, shows The Telegraph his latest water bill: £999 this year, up from £633 last year.
'Does it really make a difference if I have a shower every other day?' he says. He finds it hard to believe Southern England is truly drier than Marrakesh. 'I have watered the garden with a hose [this year] but I don't think we live in a desert. I wouldn't do it if I lived in California.'
In a flat down the road, Pat, 73, received a bill of £879 for her two-person household. 'I'm not using that much water,' she says. 'It's only myself and my husband [here].'
Helen Bower, who owns Roly's Fudge Pantry on the high street, is equally sceptical. 'I save water anyway,' she says. 'What do they think [we should do], take one shower a week?'
Southern Water defends the higher bills, with McMahon saying that 'without them we would not be able to keep taps running in the face of climate change, without taking unsustainable levels of water from the environment.'
He stresses the scale of the challenge of ensuring there is enough water to go around. While the company has been working on leakage reduction, nationwide water transfers, pipe replacements and upgrades, and plans for future new sources of water like reservoirs and water recycling projects, 'we also need our customers' support in using water wisely,' he says.
Experts have meanwhile been planning solutions to the problem on a national scale. The Independent Water Commission was launched last October to give the government recommendations on reforms to the water sector. Prior to this, in 2018, the National Infrastructure Commission published a report, Preparing for a Drier Future, warning that the chance of a serious drought between now and 2050 was one in four. An extra 4,000 mega litres of water per day would be required for resilience in this scenario, it said.
The report recommended measures to increase investment in supply infrastructure and encourage more efficient use of water, to halve leakage by 2050 and develop plans for a national water network. All of which is costly. But not taking action would be costlier. The predicted cost of relying on emergency options over the following three decades was £40 billion, while the cost of building resilience was said to be £21 billion.
The main solutions will be a combination of new infrastructure, leakage reduction and reduced usage. There are simple things households can do, insists Russell: cut a minute off your shower time and you could save 15 litres per shower, she says. Only wash clothes when they're truly dirty. Take pride in your golden lawn and avoid using sprinklers.
For its part, the water industry is already on the case, says Clisham. 'There's a push now to say we need to start looking after these assets properly. The solutions aren't quick, it takes many years to put them in place. You have to have long-term planning and long-term thinking.'
Back at the site of the future Havant Thicket Reservoir, a crane swings back and forth, playing its part in building our water resilience for the future. On the backs of the tipper trucks, amber lights flash a warning that's hard to make out in the dazzling sunshine. Few of us will be hoping for a sodden summer. But a serious water shortage would undoubtedly dampen spirits a great deal more.