Population explosion could lead to water shortages by 2055
England will have a daily shortage of five billion tonnes of water for homes and businesses by 2055, the report by the Environment Agency (EA) found.
An extra one billion tonnes a day will also be needed to meet environmental, energy and food-production demand.
Without efforts to fix the water deficit there will be a likelihood of environmental damage, restricted economic growth, interruptions to supplies and a lack of resilience in areas such as energy and food production, the EA said.
A growing population and more homes being built was one of the factors leading to the forecast deficit, officials said, as well as climate change and environmental pressures.
'More homes and people will mean more water using appliances, more water needed to generate energy and produce food, more water to cool data centres, and a greater demand for water-using services such as leisure activities,' the report warned.
Alan Lovell, the EA chairman, said: 'The nation's water resources are under huge and steadily increasing pressure.
'This deficit threatens not only the water from your tap but also economic growth and food production.
'Taking water unsustainably from the environment will have a disastrous impact on our rivers and wildlife.
'We need to tackle these challenges head on and strengthen work on co-ordinated action to preserve this precious resource and our current way of life.'
The heavily populated south east of England faces the biggest shortfall, with an estimated extra two billion litres of water a day needed by 2055, the report predicted.
Almost half a billion litres a day extra is needed just to cope with the population boom in this region alone, which includes London.
The figure of 71 million people living in England by 2055 comes from the modelling done by the water companies across the country, which are based on official estimates.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimates include an annual net migration of 340,000 people a year onwards. Analysis performed by Thames Water found up to one in 13 Thames Water customers would be illegal migrants.
A report, produced for Thames Water, by Edge Analytics, demography and data experts at Leeds University, aimed to quantify the 'hidden' and 'transient' users of their services to enable them to better meet demand.
For London, served by Thames Water, it produced a range of 390,355 illegal migrants at its lowest to 585,533 at its highest, with a median figure of 487,944.
With an estimated population of 7,044,667, excluding irregular migrants, the highest figure would mean up to one in 13 of the city's population would be an illegal migrant.
The report stated that for the next 15 years, 80 per cent of the projected water shortfall needed to be met by water companies managing demand from households and businesses, and halving the amount of water lost to leaks.
The rest would come from boosting supplies, such as building new reservoirs, desalination plants which turn seawater into drinking water, and schemes that can transfer water from wetter parts of the country to drier areas.
The warning comes in the EA 's national framework for water resources, published every five years and setting out the actions needed by utilities, regulators and businesses and the public to manage under-pressure resources.
It also comes in the wake of England's hottest spring on record, and the country's driest for more than 100 years, with the north west and Yorkshire in drought, some reservoirs at extremely low levels, farmers struggling to grow crops, and households facing the prospect of hosepipe bans.
The EA wants to see a rollout of smart meters, including upgrading existing standard meters, which the agency said would help households reduce their water use while also enabling companies to target efforts to curb demand as well as better identifying leaks.
The EA also said there were small steps the public can take, such as shortening showers, turning off taps when brushing teeth, using full loads for dishwashers and washing machines.
Emerging industries such as data centres and hydrogen production, which use large amounts of water for cooling systems, need to look at more options for using recycled water rather than public water supplies to meet their needs, the EA said.
The report estimates that the water needs for carbon capture and storage technology, used to store greenhouse gas emissions from power stations or industry deep underground, and hydrogen production alone will amount to 767 million litres a day by 2050.
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