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How Can England Possibly Be Running Out of Water? (theguardian.com) 143

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
England has declared a "nationally significant" water shortage as reservoirs dropped to 67.7% capacity, their lowest levels in at least a decade. The UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology warned of exceptionally low river flows while groundwater continues dwindling across the country. Hosepipe bans now affect all of England, with additional restrictions probable in coming months.

Water companies lose approximately one trillion litres annually through leaky pipes -- 20% of all treated water -- while the annual pipe replacement rate remains at 0.05%. No new reservoir has been built in 30 years despite population growth. Government forecasts project England's public water supply could fall short by 5 billion litres daily by 2055 without urgent infrastructure investment. The economic cost of water scarcity could reach $11.48 billion over this parliament, according to thinktank Public First.

How Can England Possibly Be Running Out of Water? More | Reply

How Can England Possibly Be Running Out of Water?

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  • One trillion litres ? That's like 1,800 Libraries of Congress!

  • Simple (Score:3, Funny)

    by Locke2005 ( 849178 ) on Monday August 18, 2025 @07:28PM (#65598434)
    They finally started brushing their teeth every day, and water consumption skyrocketed.

  • They haven't built any new reservoirs since 1992. That's worse than New Jersey, where we're kinda backwards; instead of turning low areas into reservoirs, we take high areas, dig out all the rock, and then make reservoirs in the hole.

  • Sure, England (UK) is surrounded by oceans, but you can't drink that water or use it for irrigation. Being an island, there's not as much land area to catch rainfall, as there is in places like the Americas and Europe. They may need to take a cue from Israel and start building desalination plants.

    • Re:It doesn't seem so odd (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MachineShedFred ( 621896 ) on Monday August 18, 2025 @07:58PM (#65598520) Journal

      England has no shortage of rainfall. They need to build reservoir capacity to match population growth and consumption trends, which they haven't been doing.

      This isn't a "holy shit we need to spend $100B on desalinization" problem, this is a "we neglected to scale our infrastructure and now we're getting bottlenecked the same way people have in SimCity for 25+ years" problem.

      • To find this, https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com]

        Yeah like most of the rest of the world England is experiencing drought. Not as bad as parts of America but still not good.

        Climate change is breaking the water cycle. It's a global phenomenon so everybody gets hit by it.

        Yes they could counteract that with a shit ton of infrastructure spending but they're ruling class isn't going to allow that. Any more than America's ruling class is going to.

        Your civilization is collapsing. Good luck dying before
        • I just want to emphasize that your post is partly correct, even if the ending is nonsense.

          Water use has increased during the 20th century, growing more than twice as fast as the world's population growth. And according to the UN, there could be 4.5 billion people affected by water scarcity by 2040. The cause of water scarcity is mainly the use of water for agriculture and industry, which is exacerbated by population growth. Global warming plays a role in this, but only to a lesser extent.

          There are man
        • Except this story from the BS propaganda outlet contradicts that story from the same BS propaganda outlet.

          If the UK hasn't expanded its water infrastructure to match the population growth, the problem is not the climate! Dig some holes to store the frequent rain. Scottland hasn't seen the sun in.... ever.

          Drought cycles are nothing new. I'm sick of people acting like every variation in the weather is the end of the damn world. It just isn't.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by HiThere ( 15173 )

            How about considering that it might be both? With a few other auxillary causes. Most things don't have a good simple linear causation model.

      • Building traditional reservoirs and pipelines, probably wouldn't be much less than that $100B figure.

      • "This isn't a "holy shit we need to spend $100B on desalinization" problem, "

        Indeed it's a 'we spent 72 billions of dividends instead' problem.

        Since the privatization of the UK water industry in 1989, the privatized water companies have paid out a significant amount in dividends to shareholders. Various reports provide different but similar figures, with the most recent estimates around:

        £78 billion in dividends paid out in the 32 years between privatization (1991) and Marc

      • This. The UK privatised the water companies decades ago and they've spent all that time stealing the profits as dividends rather than investing in infrastrucure. Shame on the UK government for letting them get away with it for all this time. Now it's reaching crisis point and they've told the government that they need billions in tax payers' money to fix all the decades of under investment. We have record sewage discharges into water courses, parts of London that can't be developed on because there isn't en

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Gilmoure ( 18428 )

          But rich people are rich and that means they're better than everyone else.

          Won't someone think of the poor rich people for once?!!

    • Why are you conflating England with the UK? Are there water shortages in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales?

      • No, Scotland and Wales don't have so much of an issue. I don't really know what the situation is in Northern Ireland but haven't heard much about shortages there. Scotland and Wales are wetter and hillier that England, and less densely populated. A good part of the English midlands actually gets their water from Wales.
        Not to say that there's no issues outside England, but it's certainly in England that there's most concern.

      • Definitely not in Scotland because whilst it is only 60% of the size of England it only has a population 1/11th the size. It is also a fairly mountanous and hilly country with lots and lots of quite sizeable naturally formed reservoirs in the form of lochs as well as having a higher annual rainfall.
      • Scotland has water supplied by Scottish Water, which is government owned (by the Scottish Govt), and has no other shareholders. There's a big hint for the UK government there (in this context, to the English government). But no one in the UK government wants to upset private companies who might give them a job when they get kicked out by the voters.
    • I remember summer hose bans in the UK back in the seventies. Water shortages there are nothing new.

  • It is insane to lose 20% of your water from leaky pipes. We only lose about 5% of electricity in transmission and we can SEE a leaky pipes.

    Sorry, but it sounds to me like the UK needs to dig up all their pipes and put them in the air so we can see the leaks and fix them.

    • Some of the pipes are really old. It is reputed that there are water or sewer pipes in New York that are wood and date back to the early 1800s in not before. Lack of maintenance will catch up with you eventually and it is easy ignore buried pipes that no one sees.

      • It is reputed that there are water or sewer pipes in New York that are wood and date back to the early 1800s in not before. Lack of maintenance will catch up with you eventually

        Yep, you've got to sand down those pipes and slap on a fresh coat of spar urethane at least every three years.

      • This is a fascinating book about old infrastructure. https://www.amazon.com/Underne... [amazon.com]

    • My town loses up to half its water due to leaky pipes. 41% in 2024. You can't see most of the leaks. They're underground.

      Every year we have water restrictions. While the council neglects to fix the pipes. While they turn roads into cycle ways above the leaky pipes. I wouldn't be so annoyed at the loss of roads if they replaced the pipes while they were digging up the road. At least we have empty cycle lanes to admire now. Traffic turns to shit when the weather is bad.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cstacy ( 534252 )

      It is insane to lose 20% of your water from leaky pipes. We only lose about 5% of electricity in transmission and we can SEE a leaky pipes.

      Sorry, but it sounds to me like the UK needs to dig up all their pipes and put them in the air so we can see the leaks and fix them.

      They should replace the pipes with dump trucks, like the US did for the Internet decades ago.

  • That has to be it, that's something they are asking people to delete.

  • Easy to explain: Too many old emails stored (Score:3)

    by ffkom ( 3519199 ) on Monday August 18, 2025 @07:56PM (#65598516)
    As explained so clearly at https://www.gov.uk/government/... [www.gov.uk]

    Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.

    So the reason for the water shortage must be those damn email hoarders. (Of course, the GCHQ will retain a copy of all your emails, too.)

    • Honestly it's part of a problem. Using cloud services to store your data means someone needs to build a datacentre and the most common way of cooling a datacentre is through evaporative cooling towers. People are so quick to dismiss the idea without thinking about what it means to have 70million people loading their worthless pictures and spam into the cloud.

      • If the data center has a good hierarchical storage management system, data which isn't used (which is most data) will get migrated to tape, which doesn't produce a lot of heat. On the other hand, if there's no financial incentive to do so, they may not bother.

        • Tape is not cloud storage. Try telling your customer how poor the performance will be of their files. It's not just a financial incentive, it's outright an existential threat when a better performing cloud provider is next door.

  • Stealing from Wales (Score:3)

    by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Monday August 18, 2025 @08:00PM (#65598522)
    England will just continue stealing water from Wales.

  • Any forecast involving dire predictions for a time the authors will likely be retired and unaccountable should be taken with more than a grain of salt. And this is a "think tank" report. There isn't a think tank in the world that isn't funded by people looking for a political outcome. And given an increasingly authoritarian UK government, handing over "crisis" control of the water supply would be a very bad thing indeed.

    They're also talking about capacity dropping just below 70%, something that has happe

    • It is a crisis in terms of funding and building replacement lines. 30 years and a ~50 year economic service life means you need to be spending enough to replace at least 2% of lines per year, assuming prioritization is efficient. If it isn't efficient then it is closer to 3.5-4% per year. The situation is quite similar to bridges in the US.

      Ultimately, once the water gets mixed with salt it is "lost" and being an island that is pretty easy to do.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Sethra ( 55187 )

        Water lost to the sea is generally industrial discharge that isn't being reprocessed rather than civilian usage. Leaking pipes are far more likely to contribute to ground water which remains fresh.

        Reservoir capacity has dropped below these levels in the recent past and many times previously and recovered, there's no reason to believe it won't recover again. 70% capacity is not a red alert moment.

        • Re:2055? Never believe 30 year "crisis" forecasts (Score:4, Informative)

          by skam240 ( 789197 ) on Monday August 18, 2025 @09:20PM (#65598666)

          Of course it's not a red alert moment, the idea is that one doesn't want those though. Water infrastructure takes a long time to build so waiting until there are emergency levels of water left before addressing the problem isn't terribly practical.

          Your idea of building desalinization plant above is very impractical by the way. The UK might be in a bit of a drought but it still gets many times the rain fall it needs to support the current population. It just needs to be trapped in reservoirs before it runs into the sea. Due to cost desalinization plants are almost always the last option a country should choose for water.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Sethra ( 55187 )

            Well since the reservoirs are at 67% capacity, I'd say all they need is another good rainfall to add another 33%.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by pjt33 ( 739471 )

              Reservoirs at 100% capacity aren't desirable either. You want some safety margin. A full reservoir isn't a guarantee of flooding downstream, but it's a risk factor.

              • Depends on the purpose of the reservoir and what you call 100%. Many water reservoirs do not exist for flood management, but some do. In most cases the latter consider 100% full the drinking water capacity, not the flood mitigation capacity.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by skam240 ( 789197 )

              That's why you want your reservoir infrastructure built before a drought becomes a problem.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by RobinH ( 124750 )
            It's just odd that this is on Slashdot. It's a simple public infrastructure engineering problem, like the kind we have all the time.

        • Underground aquifers that are extracted from too much that are close to the sea can be destroyed by sea water contamination.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Sethra ( 55187 )

            England is 150 miles across at it's smallest (and closer to 400 miles at it's longest). Most deep water is very far from the coast.

            And the water table itself can be anywhere from 6 feet to 200 feet, which honestly isn't that deep.

    • perhaps they should be funding desalination plants.

      Good grief, no. The solution to utterly insane regulation and chronic mismanagement of a vital resource isn't to buy expensive and energy hungry sticking plasters.

      Lastly, no one "loses" water from leaky pipes - water is never destroyed it's only moved from one place to another.

      Don't be a numpty. You're not being clever.

  • Privatisation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ratbag ( 65209 ) on Monday August 18, 2025 @08:31PM (#65598578)

    Privatise a public good, reap the rewards. She (Mrs Thatcher) sold off the family silver for short-term gain (and after she'd hamstrung the old water authorities by denying them access to loans for infrastructure). Now a bunch of water companies "compete" to make the most profit, by raising bills and reducing investment. Yay. Another bit of right-wing nonsense the country gets to enjoy.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Alworx ( 885008 )

      Exactly. If you're running a monopoly (customers cannot choose their water provider) you're never going to make major investments that hit your bottom line.

      The government needs to make them accountable and if they miss key quality of service levels, they face losing their territories

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Not just privatization, asset stripping. The people who bought the water companies extracted billions from them, selling off assets and racking up huge debts.

      It's become the normal way of doing things in the UK, and not just with publicly owned utilities. Any company that is vulnerable to take-over by asset strippers can have it happen.

      20% loss to leaks isn't actually terrible considering how old our pipes are and what other countries manage. It could go lower but if a leak is costing £50/month

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bongo ( 13261 )

        I gather the same is happening to the NHS. Private companies get contracts to do the easy profitable procedures, and leave the complex difficult cases with the ever more pressured NHS.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bongo ( 13261 )

      They're not even particularly expensive or big enterprises. I'd add something about left and right spin but someone somewhere will get offended. Like, we need commercial managers because of public waste, or, we need people to stop being wasteful consumers who deny climate change -- just maintain the infrastructure please.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jabuzz ( 182671 )

      The primary reason is mass immigration. Add a few million extra people, and boom, you need a lot more water. Yes, the water companies have been bad at reducing leakage rates, but that is only an issue because of the extra demand due to mass immigration.

    • Wait, are you blaming Thatcher? She was out of office in 1990, the last reservoir built (according to the summary) was 5 years later. Did none of the Labour governments want to provide loans for reservoirs? How many times has the left been in charge without doing anything about the infrastructure?

      Clearly, neither side has done enough to deal with the problem. Stop the partisan blame game that the parties want you engaging in (so they don't have to work or bear responsibility) and just demand the probl

  • Socio Economic Collapse and Climate Collapse.
    That newspapers even need to ask this question at this late stage proves beyond any doubt
    that were not coming back from this, some studies suggest as low as a 5% chance of avoiding this within
    the next 5-10 yrs

  • Easy to figure out (Score:3)

    by djp2204 ( 713741 ) on Monday August 18, 2025 @09:23PM (#65598676)

    They are pumping out their ground water, fast tracking it to the sewers, which drain into rivers and ultimately the ocean. Doing likewise with storm water means ground water never gets replenished, meaning desertification. Go get an earth science book and study the water cycle. Cut down trees for development means less water vapor in the air and means less rain,

    • But the water that evaporates from trees is extracted from ground water. That's how trees work. In fact they evaporate less water than they extract from the ground. It's how trees grow. That's how they get the hydrogen that they use to build the carbohydrates they're made from, by splitting H2O.

      More trees can reduce ground water. The only way they can increase ground water is by slowing down rainfall, giving it more time to be absorbed.

      • In certain regions, notably the California coast, trees precipitate (apology) fog drip from recurrent coastal fog, which forms a substantial fraction of the tree's water supply.

      • But the water that evaporates from trees is extracted from ground water. That's how trees work.

        Err no, those aren't the same definitions of "ground water". Trees barely touch the actual ground water supply, which is why they may die during periods of drought. The actual ground water is far deeper than roots may reach. Fresh groundwater is 100+ meters below the surface.

        All you're describing is the wet ground, which is not the same thing.

  • Redesigning those constantly refilling urinals will go a really long way to help save water.

    When I visit the UK I'm astonished the urinals just constantly flush all day long, even when nobody has been in there for hours, and even overnight.

    • Yes, that's just wasteful. OTOH my former employer thought waterless urinals would be a cool green thing. They were disgusting and were replaced rather quickly.

    • You've obviously not been to the UK in the last 10 years or more, and you didn't pay attention when you did last come. The old urinals only flushed periodically - the cistern filled slowly through a slightly-open tap, and flushed when the water level caused the siphon to operate. But anyway, they've virtually all gone and been replaced by unflushed urinals with plastic caps over the outlet that are supposed to keep the ammonia back.

  • neglect and dividends,

  • How? (Score:5, Informative)

    by ledow ( 319597 ) on Tuesday August 19, 2025 @03:47AM (#65599112) Homepage

    A corrupt state-enforced monopoly with zero oversight, absolutely no shame even when called out on it, and a bunch of companies (each given their own guaranteed monopoly over an area of the country with no opportunity for ANY customer to EVER change suppler) who took all the money destined for investment in their water network, gave it to shareholders, ramped up billions in (unpayable debt), gave that to their shareholders, begged the government for money, gave that to shareholders, asked for bailouts to avoid going bankrupt, gave that to shareholders, and then had the cheek to literally lobby - in the full press direct to government - that they had to repeatedly pay their CEOs huge bonuses and shareholders even more payouts or they'd go bankrupt.

    And the government / regulator literally just kept saying yes every single time. In fact, they just allowed all the water companies to DOUBLE their prices very recently (after all the above scandals) in order to... pay the water companies to invest in their infrastructure. Guess where that money's going? There have already been a dozen news articles this year where places like Thames Water basically tell Ofwat (the regulator) "Thanks, we're going to award that as a bonus to our CEO... oh, look, sorry, we can't invest as we have no money again!".

    Meanwhile, LITERALLY EVERY SINGLE RIVER in the UK is polluted by the same water companies way above legal limits, every beach too, no investment has been made in reservoirs etc. since they were privatised (not one of the things "invested in" ever came online to date), almost no money was spent on maintaining, upgrading or improving the water networks, and a dozen companies all over the country all colluded to basically do the same so the regulator "rewards" the one who wasn't quite so corrupt.

    The water industry in the UK is so atrociously corrupt that it's aboslutely laughable that the government haven't just ripped it down and restarted it, even just for the look of the thing. They've said they'll "look at" the regulator's role, but it's up to the water companies to behave, and that it's up to the water companies to even TEST and REPORT their own sewage spills into the rivers and lakes and beaches of the UK, like they've been doing for 30+ years.

    It's probably the biggest political scandal currently taking place in the UK and everyone in government is just ignoring it.

    • A huge conflict of interest exists with the regulator (Environment Agency) and QUANGOs (Anglers Trust for example) having their pensions invested in the very companies they are supposed to be regulating.

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