Droughts are generally two-year events. A year of dry weather means water supplies are running out – that is what is happening now. Things really come to a head if the following year does not bring above average rainfall. That is when the shortages start to bite, with farmers unable to irrigate and households and businesses hit with sweeping restrictions. With reservoirs at record lows and stream flows exceptionally low, England is desperate for rain.
Forecasts indicate that by 2055 England’s public water supply could be short by 5bn litres a day without urgent action to future-proof resources, the equivalent to more than a third of the supplies available today. The effect on the economy will be profoundly negative. The thinktank Public First has estimated that the economic cost of water scarcity could be £8.5bn over this parliament.
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Water companies in England and Wales lose about 1tn litres of water through leaky pipes each year. The industry has said that about 20% of all treated water is lost to leaks. The water firms have pledged to halve leakages by 2050.
Meanwhile, the annual pipe replacement rate is 0.05% a year across all water companies: much of the sewage system in London, for example, has not been significantly updated since Bazalgette and his colleagues installed it in the 19th century.
No new reservoir has been built in 30 years despite significant population growth and climate breakdown meaning longer, drier summers during which the country desperately needs to store water. The reservoirs England does have are at their lowest levels in at least a decade, just 67.7% full on average. According to Dr Wilson Chan, a hydroclimatologist at UKCEH, “above average rainfall over several months is needed to ease pressures on water resources”.
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Was it the privatisation of the water and sewerage industry in 1989 that has led to this situation? England’s water system has been widely criticised, and privatisation has been blamed for a lack of investment in infrastructure. Some say this is owing to the water companies paying out dividends rather than using the money raised by customer bills solely for investment in infrastructure; others blame a privatised regulated monopoly system that has prioritised low customer bills over investment.
Experts have also pointed to the regulatory system. Water company drought plans compel firms to follow a series of steps before they can increase abstraction, taking more water from reservoirs, rivers and the ground to supply customers, beginning with reducing consumption (a hosepipe ban).
England's water situation is interesting to me because it's very different from what we see in the United States. Looking at the raw data, it looks like something like 60% of their water use is...
England's water situation is interesting to me because it's very different from what we see in the United States. Looking at the raw data, it looks like something like 60% of their water use is household water use!
Very different from what we see in the United States, where 90% of water use is in agriculture, and only 7% is for combined household+industrial use.
You're comapring apples to oranges. The UK report you linked to only covers england and only covers water provided by water companies. The infographic you shared covers all water usage in the US,...
You're comapring apples to oranges. The UK report you linked to only covers england and only covers water provided by water companies. The infographic you shared covers all water usage in the US, including using river water for irrigation.
Turns out private water companies have no financial incentive to improve infrastructure, so we lose trillions of litres a water a year to leaks and build zero new reservoirs. I think the real...
Turns out private water companies have no financial incentive to improve infrastructure, so we lose trillions of litres a water a year to leaks and build zero new reservoirs. I think the real question isn’t how can we be running out of water, but how has it taken this long?
Public companies have no financial incentive to improve infrastructure, because it keeps utility bills low. Taxpayers hate utility bills going up just like private owners hate lowering profits....
Public companies have no financial incentive to improve infrastructure, because it keeps utility bills low. Taxpayers hate utility bills going up just like private owners hate lowering profits.
Getting buy-in for infrastructure investment before things go completely off the rails is tough in both public-utility and private-utility setups.
You are correct, and the UK has certainly had its share of poorly run public institutions in the past, however much of the mass-privatisation since the 80s was done for ideological reasons (and to...
You are correct, and the UK has certainly had its share of poorly run public institutions in the past, however much of the mass-privatisation since the 80s was done for ideological reasons (and to enrich certain people .. allegedly) rather than because there were good business cases for the operations being privitised or any specific problem being "solved". In many cases it was also wildly unpopular.
In the specific case of the water utilities there is no competition, or possibility of competition being created, it was just handing monopolies over to private business.
In the specific case of Thames Water, which supplies my home, they have managed to bankrupt themselves while also failing to invest in infrastructure and the public are not happy. They are crying out that they need to heavily increase bills, well beyond the increases they are legally allowed, to fund tens of billion of urgently needed investment and additionally they have over £15 billion of debt. Inevitably questions have been asked about where on earth all the money has gone and it turns out over the last decade they have paid out tens of billions in share dividends (and hundreds of millions in bonuses to executives), while taking on dept and cutting infrastructure investment.
From the article:
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England's water situation is interesting to me because it's very different from what we see in the United States. Looking at the raw data, it looks like something like 60% of their water use is household water use!
Very different from what we see in the United States, where 90% of water use is in agriculture, and only 7% is for combined household+industrial use.
You're comapring apples to oranges. The UK report you linked to only covers england and only covers water provided by water companies. The infographic you shared covers all water usage in the US, including using river water for irrigation.
Turns out private water companies have no financial incentive to improve infrastructure, so we lose trillions of litres a water a year to leaks and build zero new reservoirs. I think the real question isn’t how can we be running out of water, but how has it taken this long?
Public companies have no financial incentive to improve infrastructure, because it keeps utility bills low. Taxpayers hate utility bills going up just like private owners hate lowering profits.
Getting buy-in for infrastructure investment before things go completely off the rails is tough in both public-utility and private-utility setups.
You are correct, and the UK has certainly had its share of poorly run public institutions in the past, however much of the mass-privatisation since the 80s was done for ideological reasons (and to enrich certain people .. allegedly) rather than because there were good business cases for the operations being privitised or any specific problem being "solved". In many cases it was also wildly unpopular.
In the specific case of the water utilities there is no competition, or possibility of competition being created, it was just handing monopolies over to private business.
In the specific case of Thames Water, which supplies my home, they have managed to bankrupt themselves while also failing to invest in infrastructure and the public are not happy. They are crying out that they need to heavily increase bills, well beyond the increases they are legally allowed, to fund tens of billion of urgently needed investment and additionally they have over £15 billion of debt. Inevitably questions have been asked about where on earth all the money has gone and it turns out over the last decade they have paid out tens of billions in share dividends (and hundreds of millions in bonuses to executives), while taking on dept and cutting infrastructure investment.