There should be no such thing as a drought in modern Britain
I wrote last week how absurd it is that a rainy island nation like ours is worrying about water, and how the real culprit was not privatisation but our absurd planning system. The Government's latest action on reservoirs is more evidence for that thesis.
Faced with the ridiculous prospect of Britain having shortages of drinking water by the mid-2030s, ministers have wrested control over the fate of several reservoir projects away not from the water companies, but from councils.
Two projects, in East Anglia and Lincolnshire, have been declared 'nationally significant', granting the Secretary of State power to speed them through the planning process and get JCBs in the ground.
Credit where credit is due: this is the right decision. In fact, the hard question for the Conservative Party is why it wasn't done sooner.
The powers Labour is now using to drive forward 'nationally significant' infrastructure projects are found in the Planning Act 2008. It has been on the books, unloved and underutilised, for the Tories' entire period in office.
It isn't that there has been a clear need for it. Section 27 of the PA08 sets out the minimum volume for a reservoir to be deemed 'nationally significant' and Thames Water's long-delayed project in Abingdon – the cause celebre of we pro-reservoir types – is planned to be no less than five times as capacious.
Nor is it an isolated case. Bristol Water received in 2014 permission for a £100m reservoir, only to scrap it in the face of furious resistance just four years later. In 2019, Scottish councillors vetoed a billion-gallon reservoir with integrated hydro-electric project – a double-whammy against British water and energy security.
The basic problem is that local government is the worst place possible to vest authority for planning. Councillors answer to the angriest and most energetic third, on average, of local voters, and have no incentive to take national need into account when making their decisions.
Whatever one's views on housing, it makes no sense to administer essential infrastructure – reservoirs, power plants, pylons, railways, you name it – like some latter-day Holy Roman Empire, with companies forced to buy off petty margraves and bishoprics along their entire route.
This latest story also highlights another aspect of the problem: our deep distaste for actually paying for things. One criticism levelled at these reservoirs is that they are going, in the short term at least, to push up people's water bills.
Some frustration is understandable at a time when the cost-of-living crisis is biting. But not only would bills get much higher (before rationing kicked in) if we don't build new reservoirs, but paying for them out of water revenue is the best way to ensure they are actually built.
As I pointed out previously, the reason investment in water infrastructure has been much higher since privatisation is that the money is ring-fenced. Water companies have to re-invest much of their revenue in making our water network better.
Under nationalisation, revenue from water bills flowed into the Treasury, where it had to compete with pensions, welfare and the NHS for every scrap of reinvestment. It should surprise nobody that the network was left to moulder.
Of course, we could have avoided a crunch period of higher bills if we had been consistently investing in and constructing new reservoirs over the past 30 years. Sadly, we missed that chance. But the second-best time to start dealing with this problem is now – and delaying will only mean an even more painful crash course somewhere down the line. That or water rationing, of course.
Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
7 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Why a blank cheque won't solve Britain's policing woes
When it emerged last week that Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, had written to the Prime Minister warning that 'stark choices' lay ahead without significant investment in policing it all sounded rather familiar. The week before, Rowley, along with five other police chiefs, had penned a newspaper article saying that Government pledges on knife crime, violence against women and girls, and neighbourhood policing would be at risk without additional funding. That itself was an echo of similar statements the Met Commissioner and others had made over the previous six months. Clearly then, ahead of Wednesday's spending review, money is very much on police minds. Few would argue that forces across England and Wales haven't continued to struggle financially since the 'austerity years' of 2010 to 2019, when the jobs of 20,000 officers and 23,500 civilian staff were cut and hundreds of police stations closed. But the police can't pin all their woes on a lack of cash. Inefficiency is baked into the structure of the service, which was designed half a century ago, while forces haven't adapted quickly enough to seize on the potential offered up by new technology such as artificial intelligence. And although there may not be as many officers as chiefs would like, the number has returned to pre-austerity levels, with a near-record headcount of 148,886 last September. Meanwhile, public confidence in policing has been hit by a succession of self-made scandals, from the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Met officer, to police 'selfies' taken at a murder scene. Less than half of people questioned last year as part of the Office for National Statistics' authoritative Crime Survey said police were doing a good job, down from 63 per cent ten years ago. In fact, it's the lowest figure in two decades. At the same time, an increasingly common complaint is that officers aren't there when people need them. A staggering 54 per cent said they never see police patrols – double the figure recorded 15 years ago. 'I hear law-abiding citizens saying, 'What's the point of calling the police?'' says Andy Trotter, former chief constable of British Transport Police. 'What police chiefs were saying about not being able to tackle crime without extra funding – most people were saying 'What's new?' It has gone on for years. 'Imagine how many solvable crimes aren't being solved,' he adds. Trotter says police officers are 'overwhelmed' by the demands on their time and have had to 'prioritise' which crimes to focus on. That has meant offences such as shoplifting, phone theft and car crime are all too often neglected. The proportion of shoplifting cases resulting in a suspect being charged has fallen to 18 per cent from 28 per cent, in 2016, when a new system of calculating detection rates was introduced. Crimes classed as 'theft from the person', where phones, handbags and wallets are snatched, have meanwhile seen prosecution levels plummet to less than one per cent, and just one in fifty car thefts result in a charge or summons. 'Confidence in policing comes from nicking people – it's something about the everyday laying on of police hands. And it reassures the public – people want to see some action,' says Trotter, who served as an officer for 45 years in three forces, including the Met. 'I used to say, 'Get your hands on them, get cuffs on them, get them in the van'. As a cop in the West End, it would take 30 minutes to process someone. But now, with centralised custody suites and the paperwork involved, you're out of action for hours, so there's a real reluctance in marginal cases to make an arrest and leave colleagues behind,' he says. The arrest figures provide clear evidence to support Trotter's claim. In the year to the end of March 2024, there were 720,506 arrests across England and Wales, with the number of police officers at the time standing at 142,072. That works out as 5.1 arrests per officer – more than half the arrest rate, 10.5, in 2009, before policing budgets were cut. The drop in arrest levels may also be partly a result of the changing crime caseload, with a larger number of offences which are more complex to investigate, such as sexual violence and online fraud. In just over a decade, the number of sexual offences recorded by police has more than doubled to 205,000 last year, while police logged nearly 1.3 million offences of fraud and computer misuse, representing one in five of all crimes. There are growing concerns too that officers have become embroiled in petty squabbles on social media at the expense of more pressing public concerns. The arrest of a couple by Hertfordshire Police, following a bitter row with a local school, highlighted the way in which it appeared police had become deflected from their core mission. 'It's breathtaking that it could be thought to be worthwhile to send six police officers to a couple who were sending WhatsApp messages about a school – they'd be much better off catching prolific burglars and serial sex abusers,' says Sir Tom Winsor, who served for ten years as head of the policing watchdog, HM Inspectorate of Constabulary, Fire and Rescue Services. Central to concerns about the effective deployment of police officers is the recording of non-hate crime incidents (NCHIs). Analysis by The Telegraph shows that almost 100,000 NCHIs were logged by forces over the last decade, with last year's figure still around 75 per cent of the total in 2021 – when police were urged to scale back on their use. NCHIs are not criminal offences, but incidents perceived by the complainant to be motivated by hostility or prejudice, based on their 'protected characteristics', which includes their race or religion. They are defended by police as a means of gathering intelligence and monitoring community tensions, in order to forestall criminal behaviour. But should officers spend their valuable hours noting social media posts that are merely insulting or offensive? Winsor is doubtful. 'It's the online version of the 'broken windows' theory – nip it in the bud and it won't get worse,' says the 67-year-old lawyer. 'But there is a degree of proportionality that is necessary because you can't do everything.' Police officers could certainly do a lot more if forces made the most of advances in technology, to free them from mundane jobs, such as redacting sensitive documents, typing up crime reports and transferring information onto separate databases. Winsor recalls a visit to Lancashire Police in his early days as Chief Inspector of Constabulary. 'An officer told me that in order to find out what the force knew about a person, an address, a vehicle or a weapon he had to interrogate 12 different systems. Things are better now but probably not as good as the public would expect,' he says. In 2023, a productivity review led by two former chief constables identified 26 ways of freeing-up 38 million hours of police time. That would equate to 20,000 extra police officers. The recommendations included cutting red tape, reducing sickness absence and using computer technology for clerical tasks. A second report from the productivity panel, in 2024, said a further 23 million hours could be saved – including through the expansion of AI. 'Modern technology is the golden key to police efficiency and effectiveness,' says Winsor. Yet, progress on technology has been painfully slow – and not helped by a failure to manage large-scale projects, such as ESN (Emergency Services Network), an upgrade on the ageing emergency services communications network Airwave, which is a decade behind schedule and £3.1 billion over budget. 'You have to lay much of it at the door of the Home Office,' says Trotter. 'The replacement of Airwave has gone on for years – it's an area that has not been a success, it's wasted a lot of money and is still not resolved. It needs an inquiry,' he adds. There are glaring inefficiencies in other areas, too. Across England and Wales, each of the 43 forces, no matter how large or small, has its own leadership team, civilian support set-up and administrative functions, such as payroll, legal affairs and human resources. Pooling some of that work would make financial sense, says Winsor. 'The back office stuff could and should be done either regionally or nationally, in the way it's done in the NHS or the military,' he says. In 2022, a report from the independent think-tank, the Police Foundation, estimated that forces in England and Wales could save 'hundreds of millions' of pounds annually by combining support teams – as well as purchasing police uniform, equipment, vehicles, forensic services and computers centrally, rather than negotiating individual contracts with suppliers, as many constabularies do. But it seems the introduction of police and crime commissioners, a decade earlier, cemented a 'localist' approach, hindering prospects for developing a more cohesive and less fragmented system of policing, with the economies of scale that would result. 'The police and crime commissioner model has some strengths but it can hold things back, because in my time there were far too many who could not see beyond their force boundaries – and crime doesn't stop at force boundaries,' says Winsor, who left the watchdog three years ago. The author of the Police Foundation report, its former director Rick Muir, is now working as a Home Office adviser, developing plans for a white paper, based around the establishment of a new National Centre of Policing. It is long overdue. Rowley and other police leaders support the case for a reorganisation. Although their immediate concern is whether they'll have enough resources over the next three years, they are aware that it is not just about the money – radical structural reform is needed to put forces on a long-term sustainable financial footing and ensure the public get the police service they deserve. As Peter Kyle, the Science and Technology Secretary, put it at the weekend, the police must 'do their bit' and 'embrace change'. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Yahoo
14 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Morning Bid: So, it's a framework for a deal, maybe?
(Reuters) -A look at the day ahead in European and global markets from Wayne Cole. So, apparently, they have the concept of a plan for a proposal on a framework for a deal to break the latest U.S.-China trade impasse. Which was only needed because President Trump sent that tweet claiming Beijing had broken the old deal. This deal now needs to be approved by Trump and Chairman Xi, and then implemented. At least the Chinese side thought the talks were "rational", which was a step forward. Details were scant, though the U.S. team did claim that it would resolve China's export restrictions on rare earth minerals and magnets. What Beijing got in return was not yet clear. Neither was it clear whether this truce would last any longer than the last one, which might be why the early market response was less than enthusiastic. U.S. and European stock futures were all down between 0.2% and 0.6%, and Asian shares modestly firmer. There is still the small matter of whether the April 2 levies are actually legal, with a federal appeals court allowing the tariffs to remain in effect while it reviews a lower court decision blocking them. The dollar and Treasuries were little changed as the U.S. CPI looms later in the day and any upside surprise would fan stagflationary fears, to the detriment of both markets. Analysts assume lower energy prices will keep the headline rise to 0.2%, while the core is seen up 0.3%. Attention will be on whether tariffs show up in goods prices, though the full impact is likely to appear from June onwards. Measures of volatility suggest investors really aren't prepared for a high number, so anything in line will be a relief. Treasuries also have a 10-year auction to weather, with the focus on the share taken by indirect bidders which include foreign central banks. The latter took a hefty 71% of the May sale, while primary dealers got just 8.9%. A repeat performance would be warmly welcomed. Key developments that could influence markets on Wednesday: * ECB wage tracker. Appearances by ECB council membersGabriel Makhlouf; Piero Cipollone; Philip Lane and Claudia Buch;policymaker Yiannis Stournaras * British finance minister Rachel Reeves releases spendingreview * U.S. CPI data for May (By Wayne Cole; Editing by Christopher Cushing) Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data


CNBC
26 minutes ago
- CNBC
UK spending review: Ian King on what we could see from the Treasury
Ian King, author of CNBC's U.K. Exchange newsletter, discusses the country's upcoming spending review, in which the British government sets out budgets for government departments for the next few years.