Even wet Britain is destined for a future of water disputes

It’s raining as I write this, although that’s not a surprise. This is England in winter. Sometimes it seems as if the rain just won’t stop, and yet we have a water problem. Several water problems, in fact. One is that the UK has a growing population with growing demands for water, but authorities have not built a new reservoir for more than 30 years, since 1992. Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves has announced that nine new reservoirs will be built, although that will take another few years and £7.9 billion ($9.7 billion) of investments. New reservoirs fix only one part of the country’s water problem. When rain hits the ground, water becomes a resource. It has value and then costs, just like any other commodity for human use, enjoyment and profit. But the lovely stretch of the English Channel that I swim in (when the weather is better) is, like other seas around the world, increasingly dirty. In some places, discharges of sewage mean some beaches in the UK are at times unsuitable for bathing. A water company failed to stop the pollution of Lake Windermere, one of the most beautiful stretches of water in England’s Lake District, for several hours last February. That incident was only reported to the government’s Environment Agency about 13 hours after the problem surfaced. Something similar happened in 2022, in the equally breathtaking landscape of the Wye Valley. The Wye is the fourth-longest river in the UK. It had its ecological status downgraded largely as a result of chicken manure washed away from local farms. According to a 2024 survey carried out by the Public First research agency, “84 per cent of the British public see water pollution as either a significant issue or somewhat of an issue”, while “three quarters of the public think reform of regulation of the water sector should be the main or one of the main priorities for the government”. A key complaint is that water bills repeatedly rise in the commercially owned UK water system. It used to be publicly owned until former prime minister Margaret Thatcher privatised the water industry in 1989. The result is that consumers pay increasingly high bills to local monopolies, which at times provide a wasteful and failing service. These companies are regulated by a government watchdog known as Ofwat, but in practice it has proved difficult to persuade the companies to invest more in long-term improvements to the service (including reservoirs and new pipes) rather than pay short-term dividends to investors. Some of the UK’s water and sewage system dates to reforms instituted in Victorian times after cholera epidemics and what was called “The Great Stink” of the polluted River Thames in July 1858. The smell from the river was so bad that the Houses of Parliament were forced to suspend sittings. Nowadays, cracked pipes and other supply failures mean that water companies in England and Wales waste about 150 litres of drinking water for every person every day. In 2023, those water companies lost more than 1 trillion litres of water in leaks, according to newspaper reports of the companies’ 2023-24 annual performance. The worst performer leaked 570.4 megalitres a day – a megalitre is 1 million litres – or more than 200 billion litres in total. That is equivalent to just less than a quarter of that company’s entire water supply. Losing a quarter of your supply in any industry would be astonishing but the figures are, to coin a phrase, eye-watering. In 2023, the government’s National Infrastructure Commission quantified the need for extra water supplies at about another 1,300 megalitres a day, the equivalent of 5,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools every day. That same year, raw sewage was discharged for 3.6 million hours into rivers and seas. That’s a doubling – a 105 per cent increase – on the previous 12 months. Meanwhile, data from Companies House, a government agency that maintains the register of companies, shows that water companies' bonuses to senior executives increased from £9.01 million in 2022 to £9.13 million the following year. It may seem puzzling to discover that the biggest UK water company, Thames Water, ended up reporting more than £15 billion of debts. The conclusion many consumers and now politicians have reached is that, in various ways, the UK is often rewarding failure. For readers in the Middle East, a region that some estimate to have 5 per cent of the world’s population yet just 1 per cent of water supplies, all this may seem simply weird. How can a wet island in the Atlantic Ocean have a water problem? But Britain is not alone. Western regions in the US, with growing populations in California, Arizona and elsewhere, have a developing water crisis that already means the Colorado River flows mightily through the Grand Canyon but nowadays never reaches the sea at Baja California. There is no water left. Water disputes, predictably, will be part of the future even in the wet UK, North America and, of course, in areas where water has always been in short supply. The first recorded water war was in Mesopotamia – a dispute between the cities of Lagash and Umma in 2450 BCE. The problem isn’t in the skies. It’s on the ground with humans, and it needs to be fixed.