The hosepipe ban hypocrisy that will make you furious

To start the week, here is a quick-fire question and answer quiz. Q. How many data centres have been built in the UK this century? A. 450. Q. How many inshore wind farms have been built in the UK this century. A. Over a thousand. Q. How many miles of new motorway have been built this century. A. Over a hundred. Q. How many new reservoirs have been built in the UK over the same period? A. None. Nada. Zilch. In fact, not a single reservoir – vital for the prevention of water shortages and the management of river flows – has been built in the United Kingdom (total area: 94,000 square miles) since 1992. Meanwhile, since 2000, approximately 20 new, large dams or reservoirs have been built in Germany, and in France there are more than 100 water storage projects under construction. I use this litany of comparative statistics in case anyone is wondering why millions of households in the UK have hosepipe bans in force. The management of one of the nation’s most precious assets has simply not been a priority for more than three decades, which roughly coincides with the time that our water supply has been privatised, and the requirement to pay dividends to shareholders took precedence over the need to provide a reliable supply of water to customers. In March last year, Clive Lewis, the Labour MP for Norwich South and a vigorous campaigner against water privatisation, presented to Parliament the most damning comparison of all. “In the 35 years before privatisation, almost 100 reservoirs were built,” he said. “In the 35 years since privatisation, not one major English reservoir has been built.” And so, today, 10 of our water companies, covering huge swathes of land from East Anglia to West Wales, have hosepipe bans in force, requiring us to let our plants die and our lawns go brown in response to what we are told is an ongoing “crisis”, but is actually a situation that has been entirely foreseeable for the past 20 years or more. We haven’t suddenly run out of water: we lack the infrastructure needed to capture, store, transport and conserve it. Clearly, the rolling heatwaves have exacerbated the problem, and, by any measure, the weather this summer has been extreme. But, it’s not as if climate change has suddenly come upon us. No, what has caused the current emergency is not a few weeks of sunshine and heat, but more than 30 years of neglect and underinvestment. So, here’s another statistic to chew on: since they were privatised, Britain’s water companies have paid between £72bn and £85bn to shareholders. The heatwave is an easy excuse for the shortfall in our water supply. Most winters, rain falls in the UK to such an extent that our reservoirs are overflowing. But no one has thought it worth building new ones to save for that sunny day. In the period since Carsington Water in Derbyshire was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1992, the UK population has grown by 10 million, average temperatures have got progressively hotter and water-intensive industries (those data centres, for instance) have proliferated. Yet still, the water companies haven’t seen the need to improve the infrastructure in order to cope with a growing demand that didn’t require a genius to predict. Construction is now under way on the Havant Thicket Reservoir project in Hampshire, which will help to secure water supply across the Southeast of England, but will not be operational until at least 2030. Meanwhile, according to figures from the GMB Union, 35 former reservoirs and bulk water storage facilities have been sold off since 2017. The sale of these sites raised around £26m for the water companies, and many have now been repurposed as commercial enterprises, leisure parks or housing developments. We are, by nature, law-abiding, responsible people. Research by the Government revealed that 66 per cent of the population support restrictions to conserve water. But increasingly we feel that we are paying the bill, while the water companies are running off with the profits. And the hosepipe ban should be a temporary fix, not the alternative to a national water conservation strategy. So, we won’t wash the car, water the garden or fill the paddling pool for the time being. The reason we stoically take our share of the responsibility is because a hosepipe ban subtly suggests the blame lies with us, for using a precious resource for extravagant purposes. But the problem is not the British homeowner with a garden hose. It lies with the companies who have plundered our national assets for private gain. And every dead tree or plant should remind us of that.