Water, water, everywhere

The emergency water-rationing measures now affecting 13 million people across the south-east have rekindled memories of the last serious drought to afflict the country, in 1976. Britain in many ways is an unrecognisable country from the Britain of 30 years ago, when scraggy figures in flared trousers queued up at the standpipes. But one thing hasn’t changed. In spite of privatisation, the public water supply remains a creaking service using the same old Victorian mains pipes and the same system of demand management as it did 30 years ago: one where stuffy bureaucrats are dispatched to jolly us into public-spirited acts like bathing only every other day and leaving our geraniums unwatered.

A report by the House of Lords select committee on science and technology last week painted a dismal picture of the water industry. A quarter of supplies, it reports, are still leaking into the soil before they even reach the customer.