How can 'rainy England' have a water problem?!

It started wet: according to the Met Office, 1,696mm of rain fell from October 2022 to March 2024, making it the wettest 18-month period in England on record (and a positively drenched 2,086mm for the UK as a whole). The South of England had its wettest February since at least 1836. April was bleakly described by The Met Office as ‘wet and dull’. By May, the BBC asked, hopefully, ‘Spring 2024 has been very wet and mild. Will summer be warm?’ It wasn’t. By late July, even the Met was asking ‘What’s happened to summer so far?’ (The only evidence for the defence was a rather meek, “June was actually quite dry”. Ah yes, we’ll always have June).

It's unsurprising then that, if you mention to the average Brit that England has a water shortage problem, an eyebrow will be raised. When giving a talk in Northamptonshire about England’s water problem, I even had one audience member spit out their tea. But here’s the thing – we really do. And here’s why.

The easiest way to explain it is by considering our storage capacity. All that rainfall is only useful (from a human population perspective, at least) if you can store it, treat it, and pump it in pipes to people. Despite a growing population, England hasn’t built a major reservoir since Carsington Water in 1991 – not coincidentally, the year our water system became privatised. Ever since, private water companies have effectively said “thanks for the free infrastructure, we’ll now sweat those assets for all they’re worth”. And if you think that sounds Left Wing Loonie talk, then consider that Michael Gove said far stronger words as Environment Secretary, attacking the water companies (to their faces, at the Water UK conference) for “playing the system for the benefit of wealthy managers and owners, at the expense of consumers and the environment”. (A lack of investment which also led to the sewage scandal – but that’s a blog for another day).

Globally, water scarcity is measured by how much water is stored per head of population, or ‘dam capacity’ per capita. In 2021, dam capacity per capita for United Kingdom was 78.35 m3, very low globally, and far less than Australia, Mexico or Azerbaijan. Ethiopia had a dam capacity per person of 261.75 m3 in 2021, three times that of the UK. And the UK figure is mostly propped up by Wales and Scotland – England, where the vast majority of the population is, walks a water supply tightrope every single year.

Then there’s the rain. As I mentioned at the start – and all of us who live here know – it rains often in England. However, a lot of those instances are drizzly, grey days. Drizzle and grey don’t actually add up to that much in the rain gauge, but they do add up to our reputation for England being a rainy country. All of our Continental European neighbours for example have many more sunny days than us, and are perceived as drier, but when the rain falls there it really falls. Heavy rain is far more useful for water storage and aquifer recharge in particular (ie. topping up the groundwater below). Light rain, which England gets a lot of in comparison, merely helps the plants grow on the surface of our ‘green and pleasant land’, but doesn’t make it to our water supply. In fact, when you add it all up, southern England receives an annual average rainfall of around 600 mm – comparable to Lebanon or Kenya, and drier than most Australian major cities.

And finally there’s climate change. The UK’s Environment Agency has warned that summer rainfall could decrease by 47 per cent by 2070. The National Framework for Water Resources shows that, by 2050, water availability in England could be reduced by 10–15 per cent, leaving rivers with 50–80 per cent less water during the summer, and “unable to meet the demands of people, industry and agriculture”. We will – and in fact already do – lurch precariously from drought to flood. A hotter climate (potentially 5.4C hotter by 2070, as Europe is warming faster than the global average) causing dried soils and more surface water evaporation. The water cycle as we know it, but in fast forward.

Former EA Chief Sir James Bevan memorably described the multiple water pressures facing England as “the jaws of death”, saying that “around 20-25 years from now… we will not have enough water to supply our needs.”

How we capture and store the rain when it falls, then, is all important. We need more reservoirs, yes. But we also need multiple, localised, off-grid storage solutions too. Many of which I look forward to writing about in Water Matters over coming months. Until then, whenever it rains, ask yourself – is this heavy or light rain? And where is it all going? Because if it’s all going down the drain and out to sea, then we are all missing a trick.

Tim Smedley is the author of  The Last Drop: Solving the World’s Water Crisis, out now in paperback, audiobook and Kindle.