Britain facing a water scarcity crisis. What is being done to prevent it?
England as a whole has had its driest spring since 1929 and a drought has been declared in the North West of the country, as ITV News Science Correspondent Martin Stew reports
Words by ITV News Science Producer, Rhiannon Hopley
How can Britain, famous for its rainy weather, be facing a water shortage?
The answer is threefold - a changing climate, population growth and aging infrastructure are putting the UK at risk.
England alone faces a shortfall of five billion litres of water a day - that’s over two million wheelie bins full of water every day - by 2050, according to figures from the Environment Agency.
Many parts of England are already experiencing water shortages. England as a whole has had its driest spring since 1929. Reservoirs are running low. In the North West of England, a drought has been declared.
England and Wales’ reservoirs have capacity to hold 1,600 gigalitres of water. To put that in context, Australia, a much drier country, has 84,000 gigalitres of storage capacity.
No new reservoirs have been built here in 30 years. The government has announced plans to build nine, but these will not all be online until the 2040s.
Havant Thickett in Hampshire is the only new reservoir where construction is already underway, but it is still at least seven years from being operational.
Bob Taylor, CEO of Portsmouth Water, the company behind the new reservoir at Havant Thickett told ITV News that a combination of climate change and a lack of infrastructure means we are losing water.
"Our whole water infrastructure is built around the seasons - so high rainfall in the winter time that is conserved through reservoirs and storage" he said.
"That is then supplied during high demand periods and dry periods in the summer.
“But all of that has been turned on its head with much more intense rainfall in seasons we don’t expect. The runoff of that rainfall is then being lost to rivers and into the sea.
"We’re not able to capture it because we haven’t been building reservoirs for the last 30 years.”
Water storage is not the only solution to the shortfall the nation is facing.
Even when all the new reservoirs are up and running, they will only make up a third of the predicted deficit.
Other savings will need to come from fixing leakages, moving water and improving water efficiency.
The East and South East of England are particularly water stressed. In the future, water will need to be moved from more plentiful places like Wales and areas of Northern England via a system of canals and other re-routing – another huge project.
Nearly two billion litres of the predicted deficit will need to be made up for by a change in how we use our water.
For example, when you flush your toilet at the moment, you are using drinking quality water to do so.
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Campaigners are calling for new houses to be built with grey water systems which recycle rainwater and runoff for our waste systems.
All this has an impact on growth. The government wants to build 1.5 million new homes but some of their priority growth areas like Cambridge are already water stressed.
Analysis done by Public First for ITV News shows that 27,000 of the planned new homes will not be able to be built because they are planned for areas where there will not be enough water supply. They estimate this will cost the economy £11.7bn.
Changes need to happen soon says Alastair Chisholm, director of policy at the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management: “The worst case scenario is there will not be enough water available for the government to supply new homes," he said.
"This is a key plank of the government’s pledge to the electorate on growth. They want to deliver these homes so they need to make sure water is not a barrier to that.”
In Cambridge, a new development called Clay Farm could offer a glimpse of the future. Reed beds on the site capture rainwater running off roads and roofs. From there it is pumped or drained into a tank and then supplied to all the toilets and bin stores.
The water itself is crystal clear – not drinkable but perfectly usable for wastewater like toilets.
Lutz Johnen the founder of Aquality, who developed the wastewater systems at Clay Fram says the government must adapt.
“You go across the Channel, and areas of Belgium have had mandatory rainwater harvesting for the last 20 years.
"They have massively reduced water consumption and flood issues. We suffer from short-term thinking here and regulations like this need to be in place. "
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