Water woes: who’s to blame for the shortages?

For residents of the London borough of Islington whose homes were flooded this week by a burst water main, Thames Water’s decision to announce a hosepipe ban the following day must have come across as a sick joke. Just a few days before the flood, the company sent out an email asking its customers to be a ‘hot spell hero’. ‘Every drop you save really is another drop more in your local river or reservoir.’ But Thames Water seemed unable to follow its own advice: five million litres of water were lost during the leak.

The episode neatly encapsulated much of what is wrong with Britain’s water industry: crude, 1940s-style rationing on the one hand and a failure to prevent much of the product leaking away on the other. Last year, Thames Water lost 600 million litres a day – 250 Olympic pools’ worth of water. Over England as a whole, three billion litres of water are lost a day: a fifth of the total supplied.