It was hot this week, wasn’t it? You can tell, because it was hot. Committed as I am to noticing and chronicling the downfall of this country, I was made slightly warmer by a daily email from my “drinking water only supplier” asking me to cut showers down to 4 minutes, and switch paddling pools for water blasters.
Why? Well, because they don’t have treating and pumping capacity to meet the increased demand hot weather brings. South East Water, of course, have form – they have been given a ticking off for not having resilient supplies in the past – but what’s to blame?
According to the emails, demand has gone up by 100 million litres a day compared to the usual demand at this time of year. It’s about 20% more, based on my rough maths from the graphs they’ve published, and that’s a lot – but if 5 days of hot weather can drive panicked, red-texted emails asking me to cut down on the water I’m using (and paying for), I reckon that’s a problem.
It quite simply cannot be beyond the might of man to work out how we can efficiently meet demand during hot weather. Particularly because hot weather is becoming and will only continue to become more frequent.
My instinct was that this was another case of avoiding the tough choices, as a country. Investment in water treatment works, storage and so on, will either push bills up (politically unsustainable) or need to be funded through taxation (politically not do-able while industry remains in private hands).
But it seems that there’s more to it than that. Because it seems that reducing water use – rather than increasing supply – is actually the stated policy of those who state such things in the UK. There’s investment coming, but it’s mostly running-to-stand-still in terms of supply: it’s only about a third of predictions for increasing demand being met by it.
The UK does apparently use more water per person than other countries – and the South East, where a lot of people live, is stretched: taking the same amount of water from rivers and boreholes isn’t a good idea, let alone increasing it. So perhaps we do need to cut back. Perhaps we do need to switch paddling pools for water blasters. People do need to just think more about the water they’re using, and aim to cut it back.
But I’m not sure any plan based on “if people will just…” has ever survived contact with reality.
I was, though, amused to see that at least part of the plan for achieving the cut is by ensuring new houses use less water than old ones. A strong environmental argument for building new houses, finally.
