In the Lake District, the valley branded the wettest in England is living up to its name. But even though it’s pouring with rain, bare rocks can be seen on the bed of the river Derwent.
Days before the Financial Times visited in June, the gravel was bone dry — marking the third year in a row the river in Borrowdale has stopped running. “The river was completely dry and had been for four to five weeks,” says Jodie Mills, director of the West Cumbria Rivers Trust. Now, she says, “it’s becoming drier much earlier on in the season”.
The barren river seems incongruous in a region that has for centuries drawn visitors to its rain-saturated waterfalls and lakes for hiking, salmon fishing, and cream teas.
But dried-up rivers are becoming an increasingly common sight in England, where the country endured its hottest June on record. Restrictions on hosepipe use are becoming an annual phenomenon throughout the UK, and one region ran out of supplies this summer. How is it that an island noted worldwide for its soggy climate can struggle so frequently to keep its waters flowing?
Changing climate patterns are part of the picture. But a key culprit is an over-reliance on abstraction — where companies take water from rivers and natural underground reservoirs called aquifers — and a neglected water and sewage network, some of which hasn’t been upgraded in decades.
This includes water distribution pipes that leak a fifth of the water they carry, a failure to build new storage capacity such as reservoirs, and the contamination of waterways with unknown quantities of raw sewage that depletes the stock of clean water.
About a third of tap water in England comes from boreholes, which tap into aquifers and can take decades to replenish. The figure is higher in the south and south-east of the country, where some regions including parts of Cambridge receive nearly all their water from groundwater.
Elsewhere, particularly in the wetter north, most of the water supply is sucked out of rivers, lakes and reservoirs — some of which are dammed rivers. In Scotland, where water supplies are under public ownership, the issue of shortages is not as pronounced — though the environment protection agency suspended abstraction licences in several areas this summer after a dryer than average winter and a spell of hot weather put rivers and lochs “under immense stress.”
“One of the ways that you smooth out variability in water supplies is that you manage abstraction and invest in the supply infrastructure,” says Timothy Foster, senior lecturer in water-food security at the University of Manchester. “We haven’t done anywhere near enough of either.”
As a result, a dryer than usual summer can quickly have serious consequences. “London has just three and a half weeks of water storage,” Cathryn Ross, interim chief executive of the capital’s water company, Thames Water, told a public meeting of environmentalists in April. “It’s a bit crazy for a global city,” she added. “We were running into some serious issues with water supplies last year.”
That damning assessment was confirmed last month when internal documents released by the Environment Agency following freedom of information (FoI) requests showed that several regions were at risk of water shortages after last year’s summer heatwave.
The National Infrastructure Commission, a government agency, has already warned that at least 2.7bn litres of additional daily water capacity will be needed by 2050 to keep the tap water running during a period of drought.
“We need a severe jolt,” says Sir Dieter Helm, professor of economics at Oxford university. “We’ve always acted as if water was plentiful and freely available and now it is scarce.”
Down the river
For some, the water crisis has already arrived. Linda Valins says she was without water for almost a week at her home in Wadhurst, East Sussex, in June this year after her local water company, South East Water, ran out of supplies.
Although the taps stopped working for Valins and thousands of other households during a bout of scorching hot weather, there had been more rain in that part of the country than elsewhere and the company’s reservoirs were almost full.
“It was terrible,” says Valins, who has co-founded the Fairglen Water Crisis Group. “You can’t wash yourself, your clothes or your dishes; you can’t clean your home, and you can’t flush the toilet . . . it’s a health hazard and to be living in the 21st century like this is appalling.”
South East Water says the reason for the water outage was a surge in demand led by people working from home, with residents using 138mn litres above a typical day in summer. This stretched its capacity to “abstract, treat and pump drinking water into the system quickly enough to meet the high demand during the record-breaking temperatures.”
The company draws nearly all its water from 250 boreholes that tap into the aquifer, as well as rivers and reservoirs, and breached the limits of what it is allowed to abstract more than 26 times in the past year. This was necessary, South East Water says, “to meet the massive increase in demand for water in some areas”.
But over-abstraction stores up problems for the future. It lowers water levels in the ground, slows river flows — or dries them up completely. This reduces water quality by increasing the concentration of sewage and chemical pollution, all of which severely affects habitats for fish, insects, animals and plants, sometimes irreversibly.
For water companies, abstraction is cheap, particularly when the water comes from underground. “The water from the aquifer is of such high quality that it requires very little treatment,” says one water industry executive, who is grappling with the prospect of higher costs as he seeks alternative, more expensive supplies from farther afield. “We used to drop in a bit of chlorine and pump it out.”
Many are doing the same as South East Water; breaching abstraction levels to unsustainable levels, especially in the drier summer months, says Manchester university’s Foster. The Environment Agency has not updated its figures since 2018, but in a partial response to an FoI submitted by the Financial Times it said that more than a quarter of the water abstracted from groundwater bodies was deemed unsustainable last year.
The Environment Agency has granted roughly 20,000 abstraction licenses across England and Wales, which allow the holders to draw water from rivers and aquifers. The majority are held by water companies and farms.
More than 1,100 megalitres a day are abstracted from boreholes than the environment can sustain, according to the agency’s estimates, and more than 1,300 megalitres from rivers. Each megalitre is the equivalent to the daily household use of about 7,000 people.
One issue, says Foster, is that the agency has granted too many licences so that “on paper there are many catchments where there are more rights to take water out of the system than there is water”.
Another is that, as with sewage outflows, the Environment Agency relies on companies and individuals to record and report how much water they have taken, including any breaches.
“We don’t actually have a complete picture of how much water is being abstracted as the resources and infrastructure for monitoring and enforcement are limited,” says Foster. “If you don’t have a good handle on what’s being taken out of the system and used, it’s very hard to address a problem like water scarcity.”
The consequences are clearly visible on the river Wye, which flows for 155 miles from mid-Wales to the Severn estuary in England, and recently had its health status downgraded by Natural England.
The Wye was subject to just over 500 abstraction licences in England and Wales last year, according to FoI requests by Fish Legal, a campaign group. Water companies took more water, though farms held more licences.
The Environment Agency said that abstraction licences “have conditions on them to ensure the environment and the rights of other abstractors are protected”.
But farms — and other businesses or households — can take advantage of legal exemptions to take up to 20,000 litres a day — equivalent to the capacity of a tanker-lorry — with few or no checks as to whether they have adhered to the rules, says Justin Neal, a lawyer for the campaign group.
Although the permitted abstractions should cease when the water flows drop below a minimum level, there are no constraints on the unlicensed withdrawals.
“We’re sucking too much water out of the rivers and polluting them at the same time,” says Neal, pointing to bright green algal blooms, dirty gravel and a decline in salmon and other aquatic life at the river Wye. “This creates a toxic environment where there’s not enough water to dilute pollution when the flows are low.”
The Environment Agency is moving to tighten rules and from 2028 will have powers to lower abstraction limits for environmental reasons without having to pay compensation.
With the effects of abstraction made worse by changing climate patterns, experts say those changes can’t come too soon. Heavy rainfall has become more common in the UK compared to the previous 30-year-average, as a warmer atmosphere can hold more water.
The rising number of short, sharp downpours, rather than steady, more consistent rain, means the water runs off the ground more quickly, and is less easily absorbed into the aquifer. It is, as water companies have said, the “wrong type of rain” to replenish supplies.
“The open question is whether the changes to the abstraction licences will be enough to restore levels of water in sensitive rivers, like England’s precious chalk streams, and the aquifers that they depend upon,” says Jim Hall, professor of climate and environmental risks at Oxford university and a member of the government’s National Infrastructure Commission.
Privatised supplies
The pressure on groundwater supplies is exacerbated by the country’s ageing water infrastructure.
No new drinking water reservoirs have been built in England and Wales since 1992, while about a fifth of water in pipes is lost to leaks. There has been little of the innovation shown in countries like Israel, which recycles wastewater and uses desalination plants.
Now the regional water monopolies are struggling to invest adequately in infrastructure despite the growing population.
Britain is not the only country in Europe to be eyeing its water supplies nervously, but it is the only nation to have sold its water resources — including pipes, reservoirs, boreholes and treatment plants — in England and Wales to private sector owners, now mostly a clutch of sovereign wealth, infrastructure and pension funds.
Those companies — which bought the monopolies with no debt and were handed £1.5bn to make improvements — have borrowed £60bn since 1989. Much of that has been used not for new investment but to pay more than £70bn in dividends to water company owners.
“What’s absolutely clear is that since privatisation, neither the need for water storage, reservoirs nor leakage have been properly dealt with,” says Helm. Water UK, the industry lobby group, disputed the claim and said “the industry was preparing the largest investment package in its history.”
The financial water regulator Ofwat noted that almost £200bn had been spent on system improvements since privatisation, and that it had been granted new powers this year to “ensure that dividends paid must be tied to companies’ performance, both for customers and on the environment.”
Three decades after England’s water resources were privatised, their owners face a reckoning, underscored by the crisis at the largest water company, Thames Water, which is seeking funding from shareholders amid concerns over its financial future.
But if the stakes are high, so too is public anger against dividends, high pay for executives and sewage pollution, which has already meant many popular beaches were deemed unsafe for swimmers this hot summer.
“The water companies use the weather as an excuse for everything from burst pipes to sewage spills and water shortages,” says Vaughan Lewis, a campaigner for Windrush Against Sewage Pollution, who worked on resource management for water companies and environmental regulators in the 1980s and 1990s.
“The reality is that they knew these were issues 30 years ago and failed to take action. They are just blaming climate change for their inaction and financial greed.”
Water UK said: “Population growth is increasing customer demand for water just as climate change reduces the amount available.” Companies have developed plans including new reservoirs, it added, “which will reduce the amount of water taken from rivers and the environment by 2.5bn litres per day.”
Possible solutions
Now the regional monopolies are seeking new sources of water, including proposals for a network of pipes that will criss-cross the country and take water from rain-rich regions in the north to those that need it in the south.
One of the first is being built by Anglian Water, which will take surplus groundwater in northern Lincolnshire and from the river Ancholme and Covenham reservoir, and pump it down to the south.
There are also plans for new reservoirs — including one in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, which would take water from the river Thames — as well as ambitious goals to reduce leakage, and attempts to get customers to conserve water, through metering, for example.
But after years of proposals — many of which are never delivered — many people are sceptical. Jacob Tompkins, chief technology officer at the Water Retailer Company, which supplies businesses, says the regulatory system tends to bias water companies towards proposing large, capital-intensive projects, which take years to deliver, at the expense of smaller ones. As an example he points to Thames Water’s desalination plant, which cost about £200mn, and has barely been used — though Thames Water says it was only designed for use in drought conditions.
“The solution is distributed infrastructure,” he says. “We should give everyone a water butt and water-efficient taps and shower heads, but the companies can’t borrow against these assets, so most prefer big water projects.”
He advocates more widespread use of water efficiency retrofits, planting trees, rain-harvesting tanks and water butts — some of which have been trialled by water companies. There is also the potential for households to reuse grey water from showers to flush toilets, and more requirements for housebuilders to build sustainable water management systems.
Back in the sodden Lake District, Mills of the West Cumbria Rivers Trust says the group is planting trees and reintroducing wetlands as they try to preserve the green and waterlogged experience so expected — and increasingly popular — among tourists. “There’s a lot to be done,” she says.
