37 ms·

How can England possibly be running out of water?

356 points by xrayarx 1y ago

bayarearefugee 1y ago
Don't worry about it. Just lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy and reduce regulations, the magic hand of the market will fix everything!!! :D
- OccamsMirror 1y ago
  We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!
- jameslk 1y ago
  What do lowering taxes have to do with water running out in the UK?
  - queenkjuul 1y ago
    Lower taxes can fix anything
  - bayarearefugee 1y ago
    Well we're not going to lower the taxes on normal wage earners, silly. But we need to lower the taxes on the wealthy and corporations (and reduce or eliminate regulations) so they can distribute their capital to make new water! Don't you know anything about modern economics? :D
    - jameslk 1y ago
      Does this snarky point you’re trying to make connect with anything in the article? I saw no mention of taxes
      - actionfromafar 1y ago
        This is why we are where we are.
      - throw10920 1y ago
        Just flag them. They're blatantly breaking the guidelines and they don't care because they're not getting flagged enough. HN is largely user-moderated and we'll continue to see more drivel like this if people aren't diligent about downvoting, flagging, and reporting especially egregious comments to the mods. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- CommanderData 1y ago
  Consumer: upgrade our waterways please? hmm maybe don't dump raw sewage every day. Thames Water: pooposterous! we must pay bonuses, or it'll affect investor morale! Haven't you heard, your water is the best in the world, be happy :)
  - ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
    Thames Water: we need to raise bills to fund the infrastructure repair/upgrade Consumer: grumble okay, here's our money Thames Water: gives money to execs Consumer: the infrastructure needs repair Thames Water: we need to raise bills to fund the infrastructure repair/upgrade
- greyw 1y ago
  Last I heard the rich are leaving the UK eroding your tax base. Im sorry but it is going to be higher taxes for you all
  - vixen99 1y ago
    'The highest earning 1% in the UK pay an estimated 28% of all income tax. ' https://fullfact.org/economy/do-top-1-earners-pay-28-tax-burden/ https://fullfact.org/economy/do-top-1-earners-pay-28-tax-bur... The good news is that not all that '1% of the rich' are leaving. However unless this 28% of all tax figure is wrong, inevitably there will be an increase to counter the loss.
  - rainingmonkey 1y ago
    That's a myth, all the breathless reporting of an "exodus of millionaires" comes from one very dodgy report. Of course, the narrative suits the wealthy owners of the media, so the story gets repeated anyway. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2025/07/the-british-wealth-exodus-is-a-big-fat-myth https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2025/07/the-british-we...
    - greyw 1y ago
      The outcome is not as clear as you make it to be. The Norwegian wealth tax hike resulted in a loss of about $600mn of tax revenue. We will see at which point the british will end up on the laffer curve.
Frieren 1y ago
> Future generations, who will be dealing with long, dry summers, would probably be shocked at the profligate way clean tap water was used to flush toilets, water gardens and run washing machines. Climate change means societal change. There was a time that Northern Africa was one of the best places in the world to grow crops. They were at the top of civilization for thousands of years. Climate changed, what people could grow and do changed too. The difference this time is that we did this to ourselves. Even worse that we continue making our future prospects worse on purpose so a few oil countries can squish some extra money from earth. It is baffling the lack of foresight.
- chii 1y ago
  > so a few oil countries can squish some extra money so none of the users of those oil, who paid for it willingly, had any responsibility at all then?
  - lofties 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - tankenmate 1y ago
    although a good point, there is obvious surface level nuance though; oil companies hid the research of climate change for a decade or two, they also lobbied (and still do) against subsidies for renewable energy and for oil and gas subsidies (in development in most countries, and even end customer price subsidies in others). and of course there's further nuance below the surface as well.
    - AlecSchueler 1y ago
      An interesting thing that happens here is also the conflation of company and country. You mention the oil companies blocking and obscuring the research, but GP was putting the blame on the shoulders of the "oil countries." Something to be aware of with the rise of weaponised xenophobia and general background islamophobia.
arrowsmith 1y ago
No mention of the fact that our population has grown by 20% (by official statistics, likely much more) in just 30 years?
- endtime 1y ago
  The subtitle of the article mentions it: > While famously rainswept, climate crisis, population growth and profligacy mean the once unthinkable could be possible Also from the article: > No new reservoir has been built in 30 years despite significant population growth
  - arrowsmith 1y ago
    I stand corrected.
    - specproc 1y ago
      The problem with the UK is not population growth. 20 percent over 30 years is neither exceptional nor unmanageable. Population growth is by and large a good thing, it means more people working, paying tax, making pension contributions. More doctors, scientists and devs, but also more carers, cleaners, builders and farm workers. If you want to see what a falling population does, go check out a small town or village across most of Europe, it's not pretty. The problem is that we've sold everything important to a private sector that has zero incentive to invest for the long term. The government has a vital role to play in everything from water to homebuilding, which a cross party consensus has abdicated. In the case of water, we've not had a new reservoir built since Major. The argument for privatisation was that the market would allow for more efficient allocation of resources in line with supply and demand, but the experience of the last thirty here has pretty conclusively disproved this logic. See also the retreat from housebuilding. Yet somehow this is all the fault of population, and implicitly immigration. We're hurtling towards Nigel Fucking Farage as PM because no mainstream politician is willing to rock the boat with our rentier "investors".
      - bufio 1y ago
Nursie 1y ago
> Forecasts indicate that by 2055 England’s public water supply could be short by 5bn litres a day > Water companies in England and Wales lose about 1tn litres of water through leaky pipes each year. Seems like there's most of a solution here, just staring us in the face, no? Problem being of course, that the privatised water companies have little incentive or investment in order to tackle the problem. Are we ready to admit that selling off critical national infrastructure was a stupid idea, yet? It's the same story with power and gas, wherever they get turned over to the private sector, things get worse. Fundamentally I don't give the first shit about choosing an energy provider. I don't want to find a new deal every few years. I don't give a shit about choice, I just want someone to do it well and charge reasonably. Instead you get stuck in a market offering discounted signup rates and you have to switch every year, while the companies draw their earnings from the minority of people who forget or otherwise can't be bothered to switch. I don't miss that from the UK. Here in communist Western Australia we maintained ownership of the water, power and gas infrastructure, where other parts of the country set up privatised energy marketplaces. When the UK and the rest of Australia were screaming about rocketing bills, we were protected from some of the fluctuations in international energy prices over the last few years and any profits got ploughed back into infrastructure or the state coffers rather than heading off to private hands. It's just better...
- Revisional_Sin 1y ago
  The system works fine for electricity and gas, because the grid itself is maintained by the government. You have private energy producers competing to produce electricity, and private energy companies buying it off them and selling it to the consumer. Maybe it would be more efficient if it was maintained solely by the state, but it's not too bad. Unfortunately, the water system doesn't work that way. It has been parcelled off to various private companies, giving them a natural monopoly.
  - Nursie 1y ago
    I’m not sure “works fine” is a great descriptor of the UK energy sector… people do get the energy they need, at least, but they have to be on the watch for better deals all the time and make sure not to become a ‘profitable customer’ aka sucker. The price-discovery aspect of supply seems a bit broken as well - suppliers bid daily on their price to supply power, and the cheapest X units are selected (where X is the daily demand), then they all get paid out at the level of the most expensive provider in the selected mix. Seems to me that it leaves the consumer significantly overpaying, though it must be a nice little earner for those that can provide cheap power. But you’re right that water is in a worse state due to the monopoly side of things.
zkmon 1y ago
By the time the water issue become very serious in England, there would be other far more serious issues, globally and locally, that will dwarf the water issue. For instance, water issue around the world would drive the people out, water wars breaking out, drought and food crisis, powerful nations simply taking over resource-rich lands globally and so on. A swing back to medieval times.
- pandemic_region 1y ago
  On the other hand, dried-up England will not be a target for migrating to so that's a net positive for the current political constellation.
akokanka 1y ago
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brcmthrowaway 1y ago
Can't they get water from the ocean?
- BLKNSLVR 1y ago
  The desalination plants all ended up getting swallowed by the very water sources they were originally desalinating.
- antonvs 1y ago
  No. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-dont-we-get-our-drinking-water-from-the-ocean/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-dont-we-get-o...
  - silisili 1y ago
    ...the article says otherwise, that we can, do, and increasingly will. > can cost from just under $1 to well over $2 to produce one cubic meter (264 gallons) of desalted water from the ocean. That's about as much as two people in the U.S. typically go through in a day at home. What am I missing here? Even if you triple the cost, people will pay a $180 water bill before living in a water scarcity situation.
  - forrestthewoods 1y ago
    > It can cost from just under $1 to well over $2 to produce one cubic meter (264 gallons) of desalted water from the ocean. That's about as much as two people in the U.S. typically go through in a day at home. Uhhhh that seems pretty cheap and affordable?
    - Yeul 1y ago
      It's not private homes that are at risk. Agriculture and industry use up the most water and they absolutely do not want to pay.
  - deleted 1y ago
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  - 1y ago
unit149 1y ago
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KingOfCoders 1y ago
As a German, what amazes me, it seems like many people in England are on a water flatrate, as far as I understand it. No one (?) in Germany is.
- louthy 1y ago
  As a Brit, yes that’s true, I’ve never had a metered water connection.
- padjo 1y ago
  Wait until you hear about Ireland where we installed metres but ended up not using them and instead everyone gets as much water as they want for free.
- kawsper 1y ago
  That surprised me too. Flatrate is the default, but you can get a metered water connection installed if you want, and it is often cheaper than the flatrate.
  - bbrks 1y ago
    It's not the default. You cannot buy a new house today without being on a meter. That is the default. It's just our housing stock being so old and decrepit, where nobody can be bothered updating anything even if it's provided for free by the utility companies, that the majority of houses simply do not have a water meter! There's a general sentiment that smart meters and metered water will make costs skyrocket or somehow hold you ransom to abrupt and unfair price changes, as if that somehow wasn't the case today...
    - secondcoming 1y ago
      Except in Scotland where your water charge is added to your council tax and so there are no water meters. I pay £190 per year for unlimited water.
      - arethuza 1y ago
tonyhart7 1y ago
why italy use so much water???
sandbags 1y ago
As the article mentions, privatised water companies have built no new reservoir capacity and relied on drawing from rivers and other sources. What the article doesn’t mention is that pre-privatisation a new reservoir was built every year up to about 1960 and then every few years until privatisation in 1992. So we are about 30 years behind in adding capacity to the system. This combined with the inadequate levels of investment in the system leading to enormous wastage, is the answer. Water should never have been privatised. At least not without a framework for a national strategy for water. I suspect that wasn’t done because it would have made water companies and unattractive source of profit.
- atoav 1y ago
  Privatization just means that if you were interested in the outcome before (having water), they are now interested in the money that can be extracted from it. And that means their interest is to but a modern branding onto an operation that has been stripped for wires as long as it works. I grew up during a privatization wave in my country and the promise of the proponents always was that private ownership means waste is cut. Now all these sectors that produced decent services before have gone to shit. Be it postal, trains, highways, whatever. Everything is broken, underfunded, services less people for more money. 10 years ago when I said the same thing I would get a lot of counter arguments that all boiled down to: "Trust it bro" or "But governmental is more waste". Now these arguments don't come up nearly as much. Everybody can see it. The thing is, if you want to avoid waste then literally the best strategy is to go into a desert where there is no service. No service means no waste. But it also means no service.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    Waste and inefficiency should be stomped out, but it doesn't need to be ground down into a fine dust and then vaporized into nothingness. A little bit of waste is fine. You want slack in your system in case of emergencies.
    - atoav 1y ago
      The problem with that attitude is that waste isn't that easy to define: - what is waste during good times may be essential during bad ones. If your service utilizes 100% CPU during normal operation (no waste), it has zero slack for changes in the environment. - what is waste for a manager, may be an essential service to the persons using it. So maybe that cell tower in a remote area may be operating at a loss, because few people live there, but to them it is essential (or to you, if you break your ankle during a hike). Privatized services don't have the goal of covering people, but earning money. Covering people may be a side effect, but it isn't necessarily the goal - cutting waste can make the service less attractive as a whole and make it enter a downward spiral. E.g. if you cut all non-profitable lines in a public transport system your public transport system becomes less usable as a whole, as people now have a harder time fetting where they want to go. That leads to less people using it. That in turn leads to you having to cut more lines, which in turn... You get the idea. No service means no waste, any service has/to have waste - some waste appears like waste because managers don't understand why it is there. Essentially a Chesterton's fence-type of situation. Like with the OceanGate submarine implosion, that essentially happened because the late owner of the company decided that all these lengthy certification processes the submersible industry had written in blood were waste and could be skipped. He didn't posses the expertise to know why it was there in the first place, so it was waste. With some services the goal isn't (or shouldn't be) to do "something" as cheaply as possible while extracting value, with some services the goal ought to be to provide the service in a sustainable fashion to everybody ad infinitum, while trying not to waste more money than is necessary and creating budgetary timebombs for future administrations/generations/managers. Those are entirely different incentives, leading to entirely different results. And depending on which service we talk about the reasonability of chosing one over the other may differ. That being said, there can be real waste to cut. But cutting everything based on suspicion is very expensive in the long run.
hnhg 1y ago
Short answer is that the UK gave private companies to extract as much wealth as possible with minimal re-investment in infrastructure. The nation has since seen water rationing and raw sewage being pumped into rivers and beaches, but at least some shareholders have benefited, right?
- peterfirefly 1y ago
  Water meters work better than rationing.
- elAhmo 1y ago
  Yes! Same with trains.
- psd1 1y ago
  Well tbf, there is a regulator and there are price controls. They've been given license to extract wealth, but not as much as possible. I do share your bitterness. Free-market fundamentalists have flogged assets for years, and the cost to the citizens is some future government's problem.
  - alt227 1y ago
    A regulator so weak that they have not been able to enforce pretty much anything, and are about to be systematically decontructed and replaced https://www.gov.uk/government/news/ofwat-to-be-abolished-in-biggest-overhaul-of-water-since-privatisation https://www.gov.uk/government/news/ofwat-to-be-abolished-in-...
  - jaccola 1y ago
    > there is a regulator and there are price controls > Free-market fundamentalists have flogged assets for years Maybe the problem isn't the free market (since one does not in any way exist in this case) but government interventionism.
    - psd1 1y ago
      There are a few services best left in the public sector - e.g. defence, water, mail delivery. When one government, for its own reasons, sells a service, intervention is required to return it to public hands. The cost of that intervention was created by the government that sold the service. The intervention could be more or less problematic, but it isn't the problem.
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boomskats 1y ago
This last year I've noticed a disproportionate number of burst mains water pipes pissing ridiculous amounts of water everywhere, with whole roads flooded for days, sometimes weeks, before Thames Water's subcontractors managed to get round to dealing with it. This has happened before on occasion, but this year I've seen maybe 10x more leaks than any previous year. Critical infrastructure is bursting in unison because it has been criminally undermaintained for over three decades in favour of dividends on profits from critical national infrastructure. Articles like this, with subtle mentions of how it was all our fault and all the water companies were doing was prioritising low cost for the consumer, are the equivalent of 'were the nazis really that bad or were they just a bit sad and lonely', but national infrastructure edition. They exist only to soften up and distract public opinion so that we're less likely to want any of the people involved to be held to account.
- YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago
  It's not just water either. Nothing works in the UK anymore. Trains, the NHS, BT, roads, the CCRC, everything seems to be deteriorating more and more. What the hell's going on?
autoexec 1y ago
What sort of waste there is in industrial and agricultural use? It seems like the focus is always far too heavy on the individual household while corporate waste and excess tends to get ignored even while they lobby for less regulation and oversight
adornKey 1y ago
In Germany water consumption shrunk a lot, but here we also have a lot of talk about a water crisis. Another news article recently made a huge story, that we're running out of sand. I wonder what will be next.
braza 1y ago
> People across England are already banned from using hosepipes, with more restrictions probable over coming months. > So how on earth did famously rainswept England, notorious the world over for being green and wet with our national symbol pretty much a furled umbrella, come to this? > The UK is one of the rainier places in Europe. Some areas are wetter than others > Water companies in England and Wales lose about 1tn litres of water through leaky pipes each year. The industry has said that about 20% of all treated water is lost to leaks. The water firms have pledged to halve leakages by 2050. > Meanwhile, the annual pipe replacement rate is 0.05% a year across all water companies An honest request for enlightenment:There's the structural problem. There are the structural aspects of a potential solution. There's some mapping around the problem. Given that, why does the England government not provide a definitive solution? As a former 3rd world resident, one thing that I noticed in Europe is that several basic problems do not have the right incentives or willingness to be solved, even if there are the "raw materials" in place, like capital, human talent, a need, and so on. I know that some can think like the "Why Didn't I Think of That?" meme template [1], but I have been in worse places where you have several headwinds like corruption, lack of capital, etc.; I see that in England and in continental Europe you can see a lot of those "basic problems" happening and piling up. I wonder if those issues will be solved gradually or if those societies will need to have their “burning platform” moment [2]. [1] - https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/139781746/Why-Didnt-I-Think-Of-That https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/139781746/Why-Didnt-I-Thin.... [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32698044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32698044
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  Nothing can be fixed if it's always someone else fault. For a while it was the EUs fault. Then came Brexit. After Brexit, it was somehow also EUs fault, because the EU is mean or something. Also, blame immigrants.
- pm215 1y ago
  At least in the UK I think you can at a high level map out some system level reasons why this sort of "public realm" problem doesn't get solved: * the UK's economic growth has been poor since the 2008 financial crisis, so government resources from taxation have similarly not been growing as much as they used to * demographics (more elderly people) mean that spending on pensions and healthcare has been steadily growing * so the spending on every other aspect of government and other public-realm type things has been steadily squeezed: there are no resources for improvements on either the big scale or the small * plus we have (like the US) a setup where many people and organizations have an effective veto or delaying ability on building things (houses, public infrastructure, etc), which makes fixing public infrastructure problems very expensive and time consuming. As a water-related example of the last point: there's a proposal for a new reservoir near me which is classified as a "nationally significant infrastructure project". The timeline outlined at https://fensreservoir.co.uk/proposals/process/ https://fensreservoir.co.uk/proposals/process/ started in 2022 with "pre-application consultation" in multiple phases, doesn't even submit the formal planning application until 2027, hopes to get a government decision in 2028, will not start construction until 2030 and might finally get the reservoir up and running by 2036 if nothing is delayed. And this doesn't account for the possibility of legal challenges to it which could add extra delay even if they are dismissed.
einszwei 1y ago
Thatcher era privatization has been proven to be epitome of "short term gains for long term pain". Water, Power, Gas and Rail all privatized in a short span of decade and now the future generations will be footing the bill.
- nvarsj 1y ago
  Don’t forget about selling off of NHS hospitals. I don’t think many people realize how much of the NHS is privately owned. NHS pays the owners for use of the facilities. It’s insane.
- vixen99 1y ago
  Agreed!Two things here: 1. Totally deficient regulatory framework and 2. The argument for those on the Right or Left is - do those running the company bear the consequences of their actions? Do public servants? Almost never. We need water, power, roads etc., So define the goals for these and get people to run them (public or private) who will bear consequences for a F.U. Politicians almost never face the consequences of their decisions. If there was at least some linkage the future might be different. That is a fundamental problem with bureaucracy as well. As a far distant example: Tony Blair sails into opulent old age as a 'respected statesman' having lied about weapons of mass destruction incurring the deaths of 150K - 1 million.
- IshKebab 1y ago
  Don't forget airports!
RagnarD 1y ago
[flagged]
- monadgonad 1y ago
  The article, and especially much of the discussion here, is about how privatisation has led to this situation. Privatisation of a public utility which _even in many other developed liberal capitalist countries_ is not privatised. Yet to you this is not evidence that we are an extreme example of neoliberalism, but somehow “defacto socialist” and your solution is throwing fuel on the fire with more privatisation. You’re living on a different planet, mate.
- pjc50 1y ago
  "Socialist"? Hardly. I do not think people would accept the prices for desalinated water produced at UK energy prices. Nor is it terribly easy to find somewhere to put the plant and its required piping. I wonder if someone could give us a back of the envelope estimate for land area required?
Beretta_Vexee 1y ago
As a reminder, the British water treatment system was privatised in the 1960s and has been a huge joke ever since. When they were still in the European Union, common environmental and health regulations prevented the worst from happening. But as an example, one of the first actions taken after Brexit was to stop monitoring and treating sewage discharges into the English Channel. - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62670623 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62670623 - https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62626774 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62626774 - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz9kz8ydjpno https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz9kz8ydjpno Another major success for the privatisation of services such as the postal service, railways and electricity in the UK.
- sgt101 1y ago
  It was privatized in the 1980's not 1960's.
impossiblefork 1y ago
Incredibly overpopulated. 434 people per km^2. 1.81 times the population density of Germany. I think the question should really be, how can it not be out of water? There's literally only 48x48 metres per person.
- flumpcakes 1y ago
  That's just England though. Scotland has 70 people per km^2. Water is also "free". Free as in, it's part of your council tax and all water is nationalised. You do not buy it from a private company. I would prefer it was metered so companies that use a lot of water are charged commensurately. Council tax in itself is a regressive tax, so adding water charges to that makes things worse.
  - impossiblefork 1y ago
    Yes, but I think it's the population density of the densely populated regions that matters. It's not like they're bringing water from Scotland to England by pipeline.
    - arethuza 1y ago
      Worth noting that most of the population of Scotland is concentrated in the Central Belt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Belt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Belt
    - francis_lewis 1y ago
      Although Welsh villages have been flooded to suply water to the English. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capel_Celyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capel_Celyn
walthamstow 1y ago
> [England] While famously rainswept I think you mean stereotypically rainswept. 25m people, >40% of England, live around London where it actually doesn't rain very much at all. > The UK is one of the rainier places in Europe Yeah, that includes Wales, Scotland and NI, where it really does rain all the bloody time.
- BouffantJoe 1y ago
  25m is too high. London is 9m, South East England is 9.5 million
  - walthamstow 1y ago
    I included the East of England region which includes home counties like Beds, Herts and Essex. Any measure of "around London" must include Essex, surely.
    - alt227 1y ago
      IMO 'around London' is Greater London. If you mean the whole South East of England, then say that.
      - walthamstow 1y ago
        Anyone local would not think a number of 25m pop was referring to Greater London. South East England is a defined statistical region, using it like that could be confusing
        alt227 1y ago
        > Anyone local would not think a number of 25m pop was referring to Greater London. Which is why we are picking you up on saying the area 'around London' has that population. I could also say that the enirety of Europe is 'around London'. Its ambiguous at best and has no real meaning.
traceroute66 1y ago
Its a similar story for gas. Previous government sold off the land on which gas storage once sat to private developers to build houses and business parks. Roll forward 25–30 years later, UK is something like 65% dependent on gas imports from the EU who kept the majority of their gas storage ... quite an ironic position in the post-Brexit era.
bilekas 1y ago
I remember they tried to privatize water in Ireland a good few years ago and there was so much backlash that it had to be binned. Basically everyone was destroying the meters that were being installed. Water is a human right, not a commodity.
- OJFord 1y ago
  Is there not currently a charge for it (other than general taxation)? Metering is orthogonal to privatising - you can be metered or not in the UK, it's usually cheaper to be on a meter.
  - bilekas 1y ago
    No, so each household has an allowance, to avoid obviously exploitation. For example 0-4 residents have an annual allowance of 213,000 liters. Anything above that is charged at €1.85 per 1000 liters. Note : The average amount of water used by a household in Ireland is 125,000 litres per year These are majority unmetered at the household level so it's not clear to me at least how it's measured. https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/housing/water-and-coasts/water-charges/#:~:text=Uisce%20%C3%89ireann%20will%20charge%20%E2%82%AC,be%20%E2%82%AC500%20per%20year. https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/housing/water-and-coas...
- jjgreen 1y ago
  As I recall, the Provisionals threatened to bomb the infrastructure if they did ...
- Supernaut 1y ago
  > I remember they tried to privatize water in Ireland a good few years ago That is not what happened. The government simply introduced plans to charge for water usage. As you say, there was a backlash, albeit only from certain sectors of society. While it did cause the authorities to shelve the charges, it's not correct to say that "everyone" was destroying the new meters; as I recall, there was very little vandalism. The result of this mob rule is that, like Britain, we have been left with an underfunded, ageing, leaky water network that is essentially incapable of supporting further expansion.
metalman 1y ago
Here in Nova Scotia(new scotland), with weather much like, and conected by the jet stream to England, it rained after the longest rainless period ever, yesterday.Normal rainfall is several times a week, or weeks of rain every day, 3 months of no rain is a new thing.We are lucky in that there are thousands of lakes and a system of dams and locks to direct water so shortages are not a problem, yet. Though as we are aprox half the size of England, with 1/56th the population the the urgency in a drout will be less acute. 4 years ago we had unpresedented rain and floods with people getting washed away and killed, roads and bridges destroyed and comunities cut off with damage from that still evident, which would be truely devastating if it were to happen now. Civil engineering calculations were based on max rain bieng 1”/hr, and now there are regular reports of twise and three times that, and I am sure that drout planning was based on now irrelivant tables of average rainfalls and resevoirs sized acordingly. The issue for England is if the will and capacity to build better infrastructure is there, as hydrology is governed by geography and cant be put just anywhere, ie:we are talking water frontage here, dams to raise lakes, and other popular types of projects.Given that it's England, some of the water rights will be written into ancient law, and will be essentialy impossible to override, and then require buy outs of breathtaking proportions. Which leaves tunnel boring machines, sand hawgs, epic infrastructure that has to be built to last forever, and not one but of it suitable to pose in front of.
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philipallstar 1y ago
England's population has been rising far faster than it would naturally rise due to immigration. This means giant sums of money need to be borrowed to fund capital-intensive projects including new energy and water sources. They haven't been done enough on the water side. It's incredibly expensive to have the population increase this fast.
- fredley 1y ago
  [citation needed] Population growth in the UK is roughly in line with other developed countries. The past few years have been a bit choppy due to global events like the pandemic, but the UK is not an outlier in its population growth.
  - intalentive 1y ago
    Population growth in other developed countries is also driven by immigration.
- bjoli 1y ago
  Always the immigrants. Weird that they are to blame, even though water abstraction has been trending downwards for close to 30 year.
  - fredley 1y ago
    > faster than it would naturally Implying migration is 'unnatural'. Which it isn't, humans have migrated as long as they've existed, and without migration the population in the UK would be trending down, which is a very bad problem to deal with.
    - p1dda 1y ago
      It's not a very bad problem, you are just repeating the official narrative
    - philipallstar 1y ago
      > Implying migration is 'unnatural'. This is just silly. Natural population growth is a term. Being the connotation police is entirely unnecessary.
__MatrixMan__ 1y ago
I'm aware that England is not Scotland... But I was in Scotland a few years back (from Colorado) and I was constantly surprised by the incredible amount of water that came out of each faucet whenever I turned it on. Like, I get that nobody wants to wash their hands in a fine mist, but there's a point beyond which more means nothing.
- tremon 1y ago
  I'm not sure how faucets work in the US, but most valves here in Europe are not binary: you don't have to open them all the way.
  - hopelite 1y ago
    It varies, just like across the USA. Some places have low pressure and rate limiting requirements for faucets of various types, other places do not, because they have ample amounts of water. In many places in Europe it is ironically the sewage system that actually depends on high rates of flow to function properly and retrofitting them is effectively not plausible, while also causing sewage issues because water has been made expensive, which then causes lower usage. In other places in Europe you aren’t even able to flush toilet paper because the system cannot handle it. In America, because of the nature of our development we don’t really have the antiquated sewage problem as much, but we have things like septic systems and private wells that are still widely used in places because they are so sparsely populated or even just because connecting into the public sewage system is getting increasingly financially infeasible as the financial chickens come home to roost after squandering ~$100 trillion dollars over 25 years.
  - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
    Maybe it was indeed more about the response curve than the max. Never managed to quite pin down the precise steps not taken, but when you grow up in a drought prone place, you notice their absence when elsewhere.
LightBug1 1y ago
Because we were the fools who sold our water off to private companies. And our beautiful private companies did what they do best. Rinsed every pound they could from those companies, and saddled the water companies with debt in order to rinse even more money. And now they're going bankrupt ... or, at best, just staying afloat. Needed capital investment? Long forgotten about ... To do that they'll need to, you know, not raise debt to pay for the capital investment, there isn't any capacity for that. No, they'll need to double peoples water bills to pay for it. And all of this over happened under the watchful eye of a "Regulator". Has been one of the most absolutely disgraceful episodes in UK capitalism. Thanks, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. You're a hero to some ... an absolute disaster to others.
mixxit 1y ago
How many workplace pensions take profits from privatised water company investments?
cogogo 1y ago
I am very curious what the end goal of draining hotel pools as a contingency plan is. In the UK system would that water end up treated and recirculated? My maybe incorrect assumption was a good portion of that water is already a sunk cost.
cramcgrab 1y ago
Fresh water shortages is the new ice age, I meant global warming, I meant climate change. You’ll see, there won’t be any new technology invented for cheap water treatment, only taxes, land grabs, and many politicians elected. Maybe even wars.
- alt227 1y ago
  > there won’t be any new technology invented for cheap water treatment Oh there will be plenty of new technology invented, but it will either be underinvested, or bought out and buried by competition. Just like how the electricity companies buried Nikola Teslas perpetual motion machines. /s
mattmaroon 1y ago
The frustrating part about this is we now have cheap renewable energy and desalination is viable. Large portions of the world (and our country) are simply going to end up there, so why not start scaling this up now?
MrDrDr 1y ago
This highlights one of the big problems with liberal democracies - how do you provide efficient (and even innovative) public services? There is no free market for many public services like water (and where there is I’m all for privatisation). But the people (I am in the UK) do not tend to elect a government on its ability to manage these types of services. I do wonder if there some other structure that blends a not for profit ethos with employee ownership and just enough competition…
- alephnerd 1y ago
  > I do wonder if there some other structure that blends a not for profit ethos with employee ownership and just enough competition Legislate that certain public services are to only be managed and administered by the civil service managed and autonomous statutory boards. That's probably the easiest thing to do in a parliamentary system like the UK. Sort of like a "Water Management Board". Not every function in a democracy needs to be democratic in nature. Heck, this is how the UK managed colonial territories like Singapore and HK with the civil service run HDBs, and how a lot of the UK was run before Thatcher's privatization.
  - FridayoLeary 1y ago
    That sounds like more quangos? I'm not an expert on them but the way people complain about them, they have a penchant for wasting fantasic amounts of money, and have no accountability even by the standards of the civil service. Politicians are simultaneously engaged in a desperate struggle to close down the defunct ones while opening up more, because they are a great way to avoid responsibility, which of course is one of the major operational goals of the civil service.
    - alephnerd 1y ago
      Not like Quangos - Statutory Boards at least in Singapore are a part of a ministry, but they are given full autonomy [0] to recruit, administer, and manage within their remit as legislated. Quangos are a half assed attempted at doing something similar while trying to include some "inclusion", but with none of the checks and balances. The reality is, not every Tom, Dick, and Harry should have a say on water management or R&D prioritization. [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_boards_of_the_Singapore_Government https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_boards_of_the_Sing...
neuroelectron 1y ago
1. England population reaches ecological balance mediated by thousands-year old social hiarchies 2. Tax base plateaus 3. Import refugees and give them free money to increase tax base 4. Run out of natural resources 5. ? 6. Profit
- antonly 1y ago
  This is a really shallow and unfounded take. Sad to see this here. This particular issue is imho mostly related to a lack in investment in water infrastructure (reservoirs and pipes). I don't see how migrants factor into this equation (not to mention that the "free money" given to migrants is scarcely a drop in the bucket). Please spread your hatred elsewhere.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - neuroelectron 1y ago
    16% As of the 2021 Census, approximately 16% of the population in England and Wales were born outside the UK, which translates to about 10 million people. This figure represents a significant increase from previous years, indicating a growing presence of foreign-born individuals in the country. Wikipedia +1
    - antonly 1y ago
      Woah there, not all foreign born people are refugees. That's some serious misunderstanding you have there. Also, the "foreign born" statistic is pretty moot, seeing as UK was part of the EU until shortly before 2021 with free movement of labour. Most other European countries have higher levels of "foreign born" people living there, e.g. Austria, Germany and Sweden with around 20%[^1]. If you scroll further down, you see that ~half of these people are born within the EU. So yeah, check your biases. [^1]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=EU_population_diversity_by_citizenship_and_country_of_birth https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... Btw, I am "foreign born" within the UK, doing my PhD here in computer science. Most of my colleagues aren't from within the UK either. This is not because of any "policy", there simply is not enough demand from UK students to fill these places. Good luck with your country once you convinced all of us to leave. Have fun drinking your water :)
bjacobel 1y ago
Ctrl-F "AI" Ctrl-F "datacenters" No results.
n8m8 1y ago
My water bill in Texas is insane and they keep building more apartments in places with drought warnings and keep making deals with tech titans to build water-consuming data centers Moving back to Seattle in a few months
Gimpei 1y ago
I feel like this is burying the lede. England needs to adapt to long dry summers? If the water situation can be dealt with, this would make it a more pleasant place to live.
CWIZO 1y ago
It looks like we will be forever looking for solutions when we keep on ignoring animal farming in these conversations. Not even a single mention of the orders of magnitude more of water that is required for animal agriculture vs just growing plants directly for human consumption. Would it solve everything? No. But it would solve a whole lot and the fact that someone that specialises in environmentalism doesn't even mention it shows just how far we are from solving this.
- declan_roberts 1y ago
  I don't get it. Cattle eat grass. Grass is extraordinarily efficient at using water. It's what would normally be growing there without humans! 70% of the UK is farmland and I'm willing to bet much of that is non-irrigated pasture.
  - peterfirefly 1y ago
    > It's what would normally be growing there without humans! A lot of it (most of it, likely) would be forest.
    - declan_roberts 1y ago
      No it would not unless you also removed all grazing animals.
hermitcrab 1y ago
Thatcher's conservative government sold off all the UK's family silver in the 80s. Now we are held to ransom the by the big companies that own these monopolies. It was a short-sighted act with predictably awful consequences and they should never be forgiven for it.
- snarf21 1y ago
  More poisonous fruit from the Reagan tree.
gaoshan 1y ago
When a resource becomes restricted and is at the same time foundational to life would it not be reasonable to say that it cannot be held for profit?
- peterfirefly 1y ago
  Commercial food growing works much better than state-owned farms or Party-controlled farms. The Soviet Union had constant problems with insufficient food production. The successor countries didn't.
freen 1y ago
When you put foxes in charge of the henhouse, are you surprised that all the hens will be eaten? Tories think government is the problem, thus when they govern, they break the government, which in turn results in situations like this, which the tories can use to argue that government is the problem.
jhoechtl 1y ago
Thatcherism all the way down.
bethekidyouwant 1y ago
From reading the comments I can’t figure out if it’s because private companies are evil or the gov is incompetent. I suggest both.
Yeul 1y ago
The Netherlands is expected to run out of water in a few decades. Turns out climate change means you end up with a lot of rain in a short time followed with long periods of draught. Not a single Northern European country is equipped for this situation. You have to start building reservoirs up the wazoo.
arduanika 1y ago
An odd fate for an island nation that used to rule the seas. Reminds me of a line from an English poem about the irony of being surrounded on all sides by water, but it's saltwater so you can't drink it.
momiforgot 1y ago
England’s water crisis: decades of underinvestment, privatised firms extracting rents, and a state too broke to fix pipes. Fortunately, the establishment has a brilliant plan: escalate with Russia, trigger a limited nuclear exchange, and get a neat lattice of new reservoirs in the form of fresh craters - conveniently clustered around the Home Counties. As an act of war, NIMBY rules won’t apply. So next time you think war spending is fiscally insane, remember: it’s not waste, it’s water strategy. World-class ingenuity from the people who once ran an empire.
theSherwood 1y ago
I'm really skeptical of the idea that the blame for the lack of water infrastructure ought to be put at the feet of the water companies. The UK's planning system has strangled just about every infrastructure project in every domain. There is a general trend of local residents preventing infrastructure being built in the area, whether it be for water, energy, rail, or roads.
- nikanj 1y ago
  Vetocracy and nimby are ensuring the country barely shambles on until the boomers croak off. No point in putting up with construction and paying for the investments, if the current infra is juust barely good enough to last until the average voter shuffles off this mortal coil. When the older generations vote reliably and young people are apathetic, you get the current situation
nikanj 1y ago
Same reason as with the housing stock: In a vetocracy, infrastructure does not get built to keep up with a growing population. Not building a single new reservoir for 30 years is bonkers, when the population has grown about 20% and migrated from the rural areas to the cities
BrtByte 1y ago
When infrastructure becomes a profit center, long-term resilience tends to lose out to short-term returns
curtisszmania 1y ago
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catigula 1y ago
There's a magician's trick done when people talk about a problem directly attributable to massive population growth and instead of looking at cause, they look at effect.
- sgt101 1y ago
  I wondered if anyone would point this out. England's population has risen 25% in my lifetime. Worse, the (perfectly adequate for this level of population) water infrastructure in in the wrong place... It's all in the North East in order to supply steel mills that are no longer there!
  - catigula 1y ago
    There's a similar phenomenon in the US when someone talks about "needing to have had built housing", as if this tidal wave of people was just some necessary fact of reality. This is something that was intentionally done and the argument was had and, agree or not, people didn't want it to happen. It happened anyways. Of course, the policy can be reversed.
alexk307 1y ago
> As climate breakdown accelerates, rainfall patterns are changing fast, and water will increasingly become less available at certain times of year. As Sir David King, a former UK chief scientific adviser who chairs the Climate Crisis Advisory Group, says: “Drought in England is no longer a warning. It is a clear signal that climate collapse is unravelling our water, food and natural systems right now. Rainfall over all of the UK has been increasing since 1840 accord to the Met Office [1]. How is a drought a clear signal of collapse if they've been happening since before the industrial revolution? [2] [1] https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-temperature-rainfall-and-sunshine-time-series https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/... [2] https://iahs.info/uploads/dms/13708.88-483-489-81-308-Cole-FRIEND-2006.pdf https://iahs.info/uploads/dms/13708.88-483-489-81-308-Cole-F...
wtbdbrrr 1y ago
3D printers and all that tech around tiny container-sized nuclear plants + all that cool MIT stuff to desalinate water should solve that problem rather quickly, when it becomes a problem, no?
golemiprague 1y ago
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davidf18 1y ago
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mensetmanusman 1y ago
Imagine if government attracted the most competent people.
samathaglen34 1y ago
[dead]

356 points by xrayarx 1y ago

Don't worry about it. Just lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy and reduce regulations, the magic hand of the market will fix everything!!! :D

OccamsMirror 1y ago
We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!
jameslk 1y ago
What do lowering taxes have to do with water running out in the UK?
- queenkjuul 1y ago
  Lower taxes can fix anything
- bayarearefugee 1y ago
  Well we're not going to lower the taxes on normal wage earners, silly. But we need to lower the taxes on the wealthy and corporations (and reduce or eliminate regulations) so they can distribute their capital to make new water! Don't you know anything about modern economics? :D
  - jameslk 1y ago
    Does this snarky point you’re trying to make connect with anything in the article? I saw no mention of taxes
    - actionfromafar 1y ago
      This is why we are where we are.
    - throw10920 1y ago
      Just flag them. They're blatantly breaking the guidelines and they don't care because they're not getting flagged enough. HN is largely user-moderated and we'll continue to see more drivel like this if people aren't diligent about downvoting, flagging, and reporting especially egregious comments to the mods. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
CommanderData 1y ago
Consumer: upgrade our waterways please? hmm maybe don't dump raw sewage every day. Thames Water: pooposterous! we must pay bonuses, or it'll affect investor morale! Haven't you heard, your water is the best in the world, be happy :)
- ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
  Thames Water: we need to raise bills to fund the infrastructure repair/upgrade Consumer: grumble okay, here's our money Thames Water: gives money to execs Consumer: the infrastructure needs repair Thames Water: we need to raise bills to fund the infrastructure repair/upgrade
greyw 1y ago
Last I heard the rich are leaving the UK eroding your tax base. Im sorry but it is going to be higher taxes for you all
- vixen99 1y ago
  'The highest earning 1% in the UK pay an estimated 28% of all income tax. ' https://fullfact.org/economy/do-top-1-earners-pay-28-tax-burden/ https://fullfact.org/economy/do-top-1-earners-pay-28-tax-bur... The good news is that not all that '1% of the rich' are leaving. However unless this 28% of all tax figure is wrong, inevitably there will be an increase to counter the loss.
- rainingmonkey 1y ago
  That's a myth, all the breathless reporting of an "exodus of millionaires" comes from one very dodgy report. Of course, the narrative suits the wealthy owners of the media, so the story gets repeated anyway. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2025/07/the-british-wealth-exodus-is-a-big-fat-myth https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2025/07/the-british-we...
  - greyw 1y ago
    The outcome is not as clear as you make it to be. The Norwegian wealth tax hike resulted in a loss of about $600mn of tax revenue. We will see at which point the british will end up on the laffer curve.

Frieren 1y ago

> Future generations, who will be dealing with long, dry summers, would probably be shocked at the profligate way clean tap water was used to flush toilets, water gardens and run washing machines. Climate change means societal change. There was a time that Northern Africa was one of the best places in the world to grow crops. They were at the top of civilization for thousands of years. Climate changed, what people could grow and do changed too. The difference this time is that we did this to ourselves. Even worse that we continue making our future prospects worse on purpose so a few oil countries can squish some extra money from earth. It is baffling the lack of foresight.

chii 1y ago
> so a few oil countries can squish some extra money so none of the users of those oil, who paid for it willingly, had any responsibility at all then?
- lofties 1y ago
  [flagged]
- tankenmate 1y ago
  although a good point, there is obvious surface level nuance though; oil companies hid the research of climate change for a decade or two, they also lobbied (and still do) against subsidies for renewable energy and for oil and gas subsidies (in development in most countries, and even end customer price subsidies in others). and of course there's further nuance below the surface as well.
  - AlecSchueler 1y ago
    An interesting thing that happens here is also the conflation of company and country. You mention the oil companies blocking and obscuring the research, but GP was putting the blame on the shoulders of the "oil countries." Something to be aware of with the rise of weaponised xenophobia and general background islamophobia.

arrowsmith 1y ago

No mention of the fact that our population has grown by 20% (by official statistics, likely much more) in just 30 years?

endtime 1y ago
The subtitle of the article mentions it: > While famously rainswept, climate crisis, population growth and profligacy mean the once unthinkable could be possible Also from the article: > No new reservoir has been built in 30 years despite significant population growth
- arrowsmith 1y ago
  I stand corrected.
  - specproc 1y ago
    The problem with the UK is not population growth. 20 percent over 30 years is neither exceptional nor unmanageable. Population growth is by and large a good thing, it means more people working, paying tax, making pension contributions. More doctors, scientists and devs, but also more carers, cleaners, builders and farm workers. If you want to see what a falling population does, go check out a small town or village across most of Europe, it's not pretty. The problem is that we've sold everything important to a private sector that has zero incentive to invest for the long term. The government has a vital role to play in everything from water to homebuilding, which a cross party consensus has abdicated. In the case of water, we've not had a new reservoir built since Major. The argument for privatisation was that the market would allow for more efficient allocation of resources in line with supply and demand, but the experience of the last thirty here has pretty conclusively disproved this logic. See also the retreat from housebuilding. Yet somehow this is all the fault of population, and implicitly immigration. We're hurtling towards Nigel Fucking Farage as PM because no mainstream politician is willing to rock the boat with our rentier "investors".
    - bufio 1y ago

Nursie 1y ago

> Forecasts indicate that by 2055 England’s public water supply could be short by 5bn litres a day > Water companies in England and Wales lose about 1tn litres of water through leaky pipes each year. Seems like there's most of a solution here, just staring us in the face, no? Problem being of course, that the privatised water companies have little incentive or investment in order to tackle the problem. Are we ready to admit that selling off critical national infrastructure was a stupid idea, yet? It's the same story with power and gas, wherever they get turned over to the private sector, things get worse. Fundamentally I don't give the first shit about choosing an energy provider. I don't want to find a new deal every few years. I don't give a shit about choice, I just want someone to do it well and charge reasonably. Instead you get stuck in a market offering discounted signup rates and you have to switch every year, while the companies draw their earnings from the minority of people who forget or otherwise can't be bothered to switch. I don't miss that from the UK. Here in communist Western Australia we maintained ownership of the water, power and gas infrastructure, where other parts of the country set up privatised energy marketplaces. When the UK and the rest of Australia were screaming about rocketing bills, we were protected from some of the fluctuations in international energy prices over the last few years and any profits got ploughed back into infrastructure or the state coffers rather than heading off to private hands. It's just better...

Revisional_Sin 1y ago
The system works fine for electricity and gas, because the grid itself is maintained by the government. You have private energy producers competing to produce electricity, and private energy companies buying it off them and selling it to the consumer. Maybe it would be more efficient if it was maintained solely by the state, but it's not too bad. Unfortunately, the water system doesn't work that way. It has been parcelled off to various private companies, giving them a natural monopoly.
- Nursie 1y ago
  I’m not sure “works fine” is a great descriptor of the UK energy sector… people do get the energy they need, at least, but they have to be on the watch for better deals all the time and make sure not to become a ‘profitable customer’ aka sucker. The price-discovery aspect of supply seems a bit broken as well - suppliers bid daily on their price to supply power, and the cheapest X units are selected (where X is the daily demand), then they all get paid out at the level of the most expensive provider in the selected mix. Seems to me that it leaves the consumer significantly overpaying, though it must be a nice little earner for those that can provide cheap power. But you’re right that water is in a worse state due to the monopoly side of things.

zkmon 1y ago

By the time the water issue become very serious in England, there would be other far more serious issues, globally and locally, that will dwarf the water issue. For instance, water issue around the world would drive the people out, water wars breaking out, drought and food crisis, powerful nations simply taking over resource-rich lands globally and so on. A swing back to medieval times.

pandemic_region 1y ago
On the other hand, dried-up England will not be a target for migrating to so that's a net positive for the current political constellation.

akokanka 1y ago

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brcmthrowaway 1y ago

Can't they get water from the ocean?

BLKNSLVR 1y ago
The desalination plants all ended up getting swallowed by the very water sources they were originally desalinating.
antonvs 1y ago
No. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-dont-we-get-our-drinking-water-from-the-ocean/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-dont-we-get-o...
- silisili 1y ago
  ...the article says otherwise, that we can, do, and increasingly will. > can cost from just under $1 to well over $2 to produce one cubic meter (264 gallons) of desalted water from the ocean. That's about as much as two people in the U.S. typically go through in a day at home. What am I missing here? Even if you triple the cost, people will pay a $180 water bill before living in a water scarcity situation.
- forrestthewoods 1y ago
  > It can cost from just under $1 to well over $2 to produce one cubic meter (264 gallons) of desalted water from the ocean. That's about as much as two people in the U.S. typically go through in a day at home. Uhhhh that seems pretty cheap and affordable?
  - Yeul 1y ago
    It's not private homes that are at risk. Agriculture and industry use up the most water and they absolutely do not want to pay.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- 1y ago

unit149 1y ago

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KingOfCoders 1y ago

As a German, what amazes me, it seems like many people in England are on a water flatrate, as far as I understand it. No one (?) in Germany is.

louthy 1y ago
As a Brit, yes that’s true, I’ve never had a metered water connection.
padjo 1y ago
Wait until you hear about Ireland where we installed metres but ended up not using them and instead everyone gets as much water as they want for free.
kawsper 1y ago
That surprised me too. Flatrate is the default, but you can get a metered water connection installed if you want, and it is often cheaper than the flatrate.
- bbrks 1y ago
  It's not the default. You cannot buy a new house today without being on a meter. That is the default. It's just our housing stock being so old and decrepit, where nobody can be bothered updating anything even if it's provided for free by the utility companies, that the majority of houses simply do not have a water meter! There's a general sentiment that smart meters and metered water will make costs skyrocket or somehow hold you ransom to abrupt and unfair price changes, as if that somehow wasn't the case today...
  - secondcoming 1y ago
    Except in Scotland where your water charge is added to your council tax and so there are no water meters. I pay £190 per year for unlimited water.
    - arethuza 1y ago

tonyhart7 1y ago

why italy use so much water???

sandbags 1y ago

As the article mentions, privatised water companies have built no new reservoir capacity and relied on drawing from rivers and other sources. What the article doesn’t mention is that pre-privatisation a new reservoir was built every year up to about 1960 and then every few years until privatisation in 1992. So we are about 30 years behind in adding capacity to the system. This combined with the inadequate levels of investment in the system leading to enormous wastage, is the answer. Water should never have been privatised. At least not without a framework for a national strategy for water. I suspect that wasn’t done because it would have made water companies and unattractive source of profit.

atoav 1y ago
Privatization just means that if you were interested in the outcome before (having water), they are now interested in the money that can be extracted from it. And that means their interest is to but a modern branding onto an operation that has been stripped for wires as long as it works. I grew up during a privatization wave in my country and the promise of the proponents always was that private ownership means waste is cut. Now all these sectors that produced decent services before have gone to shit. Be it postal, trains, highways, whatever. Everything is broken, underfunded, services less people for more money. 10 years ago when I said the same thing I would get a lot of counter arguments that all boiled down to: "Trust it bro" or "But governmental is more waste". Now these arguments don't come up nearly as much. Everybody can see it. The thing is, if you want to avoid waste then literally the best strategy is to go into a desert where there is no service. No service means no waste. But it also means no service.
- fragmede 1y ago
  Waste and inefficiency should be stomped out, but it doesn't need to be ground down into a fine dust and then vaporized into nothingness. A little bit of waste is fine. You want slack in your system in case of emergencies.
  - atoav 1y ago
    The problem with that attitude is that waste isn't that easy to define: - what is waste during good times may be essential during bad ones. If your service utilizes 100% CPU during normal operation (no waste), it has zero slack for changes in the environment. - what is waste for a manager, may be an essential service to the persons using it. So maybe that cell tower in a remote area may be operating at a loss, because few people live there, but to them it is essential (or to you, if you break your ankle during a hike). Privatized services don't have the goal of covering people, but earning money. Covering people may be a side effect, but it isn't necessarily the goal - cutting waste can make the service less attractive as a whole and make it enter a downward spiral. E.g. if you cut all non-profitable lines in a public transport system your public transport system becomes less usable as a whole, as people now have a harder time fetting where they want to go. That leads to less people using it. That in turn leads to you having to cut more lines, which in turn... You get the idea. No service means no waste, any service has/to have waste - some waste appears like waste because managers don't understand why it is there. Essentially a Chesterton's fence-type of situation. Like with the OceanGate submarine implosion, that essentially happened because the late owner of the company decided that all these lengthy certification processes the submersible industry had written in blood were waste and could be skipped. He didn't posses the expertise to know why it was there in the first place, so it was waste. With some services the goal isn't (or shouldn't be) to do "something" as cheaply as possible while extracting value, with some services the goal ought to be to provide the service in a sustainable fashion to everybody ad infinitum, while trying not to waste more money than is necessary and creating budgetary timebombs for future administrations/generations/managers. Those are entirely different incentives, leading to entirely different results. And depending on which service we talk about the reasonability of chosing one over the other may differ. That being said, there can be real waste to cut. But cutting everything based on suspicion is very expensive in the long run.

hnhg 1y ago

Short answer is that the UK gave private companies to extract as much wealth as possible with minimal re-investment in infrastructure. The nation has since seen water rationing and raw sewage being pumped into rivers and beaches, but at least some shareholders have benefited, right?

peterfirefly 1y ago
Water meters work better than rationing.
elAhmo 1y ago
Yes! Same with trains.
psd1 1y ago
Well tbf, there is a regulator and there are price controls. They've been given license to extract wealth, but not as much as possible. I do share your bitterness. Free-market fundamentalists have flogged assets for years, and the cost to the citizens is some future government's problem.
- alt227 1y ago
  A regulator so weak that they have not been able to enforce pretty much anything, and are about to be systematically decontructed and replaced https://www.gov.uk/government/news/ofwat-to-be-abolished-in-biggest-overhaul-of-water-since-privatisation https://www.gov.uk/government/news/ofwat-to-be-abolished-in-...
- jaccola 1y ago
  > there is a regulator and there are price controls > Free-market fundamentalists have flogged assets for years Maybe the problem isn't the free market (since one does not in any way exist in this case) but government interventionism.
  - psd1 1y ago
    There are a few services best left in the public sector - e.g. defence, water, mail delivery. When one government, for its own reasons, sells a service, intervention is required to return it to public hands. The cost of that intervention was created by the government that sold the service. The intervention could be more or less problematic, but it isn't the problem.

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boomskats 1y ago

This last year I've noticed a disproportionate number of burst mains water pipes pissing ridiculous amounts of water everywhere, with whole roads flooded for days, sometimes weeks, before Thames Water's subcontractors managed to get round to dealing with it. This has happened before on occasion, but this year I've seen maybe 10x more leaks than any previous year. Critical infrastructure is bursting in unison because it has been criminally undermaintained for over three decades in favour of dividends on profits from critical national infrastructure. Articles like this, with subtle mentions of how it was all our fault and all the water companies were doing was prioritising low cost for the consumer, are the equivalent of 'were the nazis really that bad or were they just a bit sad and lonely', but national infrastructure edition. They exist only to soften up and distract public opinion so that we're less likely to want any of the people involved to be held to account.

YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago
It's not just water either. Nothing works in the UK anymore. Trains, the NHS, BT, roads, the CCRC, everything seems to be deteriorating more and more. What the hell's going on?

autoexec 1y ago

What sort of waste there is in industrial and agricultural use? It seems like the focus is always far too heavy on the individual household while corporate waste and excess tends to get ignored even while they lobby for less regulation and oversight

adornKey 1y ago

In Germany water consumption shrunk a lot, but here we also have a lot of talk about a water crisis. Another news article recently made a huge story, that we're running out of sand. I wonder what will be next.

braza 1y ago

> People across England are already banned from using hosepipes, with more restrictions probable over coming months. > So how on earth did famously rainswept England, notorious the world over for being green and wet with our national symbol pretty much a furled umbrella, come to this? > The UK is one of the rainier places in Europe. Some areas are wetter than others > Water companies in England and Wales lose about 1tn litres of water through leaky pipes each year. The industry has said that about 20% of all treated water is lost to leaks. The water firms have pledged to halve leakages by 2050. > Meanwhile, the annual pipe replacement rate is 0.05% a year across all water companies An honest request for enlightenment:There's the structural problem. There are the structural aspects of a potential solution. There's some mapping around the problem. Given that, why does the England government not provide a definitive solution? As a former 3rd world resident, one thing that I noticed in Europe is that several basic problems do not have the right incentives or willingness to be solved, even if there are the "raw materials" in place, like capital, human talent, a need, and so on. I know that some can think like the "Why Didn't I Think of That?" meme template [1], but I have been in worse places where you have several headwinds like corruption, lack of capital, etc.; I see that in England and in continental Europe you can see a lot of those "basic problems" happening and piling up. I wonder if those issues will be solved gradually or if those societies will need to have their “burning platform” moment [2]. [1] - https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/139781746/Why-Didnt-I-Think-Of-That https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/139781746/Why-Didnt-I-Thin.... [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32698044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32698044

actionfromafar 1y ago
Nothing can be fixed if it's always someone else fault. For a while it was the EUs fault. Then came Brexit. After Brexit, it was somehow also EUs fault, because the EU is mean or something. Also, blame immigrants.
pm215 1y ago
At least in the UK I think you can at a high level map out some system level reasons why this sort of "public realm" problem doesn't get solved: * the UK's economic growth has been poor since the 2008 financial crisis, so government resources from taxation have similarly not been growing as much as they used to * demographics (more elderly people) mean that spending on pensions and healthcare has been steadily growing * so the spending on every other aspect of government and other public-realm type things has been steadily squeezed: there are no resources for improvements on either the big scale or the small * plus we have (like the US) a setup where many people and organizations have an effective veto or delaying ability on building things (houses, public infrastructure, etc), which makes fixing public infrastructure problems very expensive and time consuming. As a water-related example of the last point: there's a proposal for a new reservoir near me which is classified as a "nationally significant infrastructure project". The timeline outlined at https://fensreservoir.co.uk/proposals/process/ https://fensreservoir.co.uk/proposals/process/ started in 2022 with "pre-application consultation" in multiple phases, doesn't even submit the formal planning application until 2027, hopes to get a government decision in 2028, will not start construction until 2030 and might finally get the reservoir up and running by 2036 if nothing is delayed. And this doesn't account for the possibility of legal challenges to it which could add extra delay even if they are dismissed.

einszwei 1y ago

Thatcher era privatization has been proven to be epitome of "short term gains for long term pain". Water, Power, Gas and Rail all privatized in a short span of decade and now the future generations will be footing the bill.

nvarsj 1y ago
Don’t forget about selling off of NHS hospitals. I don’t think many people realize how much of the NHS is privately owned. NHS pays the owners for use of the facilities. It’s insane.
vixen99 1y ago
Agreed!Two things here: 1. Totally deficient regulatory framework and 2. The argument for those on the Right or Left is - do those running the company bear the consequences of their actions? Do public servants? Almost never. We need water, power, roads etc., So define the goals for these and get people to run them (public or private) who will bear consequences for a F.U. Politicians almost never face the consequences of their decisions. If there was at least some linkage the future might be different. That is a fundamental problem with bureaucracy as well. As a far distant example: Tony Blair sails into opulent old age as a 'respected statesman' having lied about weapons of mass destruction incurring the deaths of 150K - 1 million.
IshKebab 1y ago
Don't forget airports!

RagnarD 1y ago

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monadgonad 1y ago
The article, and especially much of the discussion here, is about how privatisation has led to this situation. Privatisation of a public utility which _even in many other developed liberal capitalist countries_ is not privatised. Yet to you this is not evidence that we are an extreme example of neoliberalism, but somehow “defacto socialist” and your solution is throwing fuel on the fire with more privatisation. You’re living on a different planet, mate.
pjc50 1y ago
"Socialist"? Hardly. I do not think people would accept the prices for desalinated water produced at UK energy prices. Nor is it terribly easy to find somewhere to put the plant and its required piping. I wonder if someone could give us a back of the envelope estimate for land area required?

Beretta_Vexee 1y ago

As a reminder, the British water treatment system was privatised in the 1960s and has been a huge joke ever since. When they were still in the European Union, common environmental and health regulations prevented the worst from happening. But as an example, one of the first actions taken after Brexit was to stop monitoring and treating sewage discharges into the English Channel. - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62670623 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62670623 - https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62626774 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62626774 - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz9kz8ydjpno https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz9kz8ydjpno Another major success for the privatisation of services such as the postal service, railways and electricity in the UK.

sgt101 1y ago
It was privatized in the 1980's not 1960's.

impossiblefork 1y ago

Incredibly overpopulated. 434 people per km^2. 1.81 times the population density of Germany. I think the question should really be, how can it not be out of water? There's literally only 48x48 metres per person.

flumpcakes 1y ago
That's just England though. Scotland has 70 people per km^2. Water is also "free". Free as in, it's part of your council tax and all water is nationalised. You do not buy it from a private company. I would prefer it was metered so companies that use a lot of water are charged commensurately. Council tax in itself is a regressive tax, so adding water charges to that makes things worse.
- impossiblefork 1y ago
  Yes, but I think it's the population density of the densely populated regions that matters. It's not like they're bringing water from Scotland to England by pipeline.
  - arethuza 1y ago
    Worth noting that most of the population of Scotland is concentrated in the Central Belt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Belt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Belt
  - francis_lewis 1y ago
    Although Welsh villages have been flooded to suply water to the English. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capel_Celyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capel_Celyn

walthamstow 1y ago

> [England] While famously rainswept I think you mean stereotypically rainswept. 25m people, >40% of England, live around London where it actually doesn't rain very much at all. > The UK is one of the rainier places in Europe Yeah, that includes Wales, Scotland and NI, where it really does rain all the bloody time.

BouffantJoe 1y ago
25m is too high. London is 9m, South East England is 9.5 million
- walthamstow 1y ago
  I included the East of England region which includes home counties like Beds, Herts and Essex. Any measure of "around London" must include Essex, surely.
  - alt227 1y ago
    IMO 'around London' is Greater London. If you mean the whole South East of England, then say that.
    - walthamstow 1y ago
      Anyone local would not think a number of 25m pop was referring to Greater London. South East England is a defined statistical region, using it like that could be confusing
      - alt227 1y ago
        > Anyone local would not think a number of 25m pop was referring to Greater London. Which is why we are picking you up on saying the area 'around London' has that population. I could also say that the enirety of Europe is 'around London'. Its ambiguous at best and has no real meaning.

traceroute66 1y ago

Its a similar story for gas. Previous government sold off the land on which gas storage once sat to private developers to build houses and business parks. Roll forward 25–30 years later, UK is something like 65% dependent on gas imports from the EU who kept the majority of their gas storage ... quite an ironic position in the post-Brexit era.

bilekas 1y ago

I remember they tried to privatize water in Ireland a good few years ago and there was so much backlash that it had to be binned. Basically everyone was destroying the meters that were being installed. Water is a human right, not a commodity.

OJFord 1y ago
Is there not currently a charge for it (other than general taxation)? Metering is orthogonal to privatising - you can be metered or not in the UK, it's usually cheaper to be on a meter.
- bilekas 1y ago
  No, so each household has an allowance, to avoid obviously exploitation. For example 0-4 residents have an annual allowance of 213,000 liters. Anything above that is charged at €1.85 per 1000 liters. Note : The average amount of water used by a household in Ireland is 125,000 litres per year These are majority unmetered at the household level so it's not clear to me at least how it's measured. https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/housing/water-and-coasts/water-charges/#:~:text=Uisce%20%C3%89ireann%20will%20charge%20%E2%82%AC,be%20%E2%82%AC500%20per%20year. https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/housing/water-and-coas...
jjgreen 1y ago
As I recall, the Provisionals threatened to bomb the infrastructure if they did ...
Supernaut 1y ago
> I remember they tried to privatize water in Ireland a good few years ago That is not what happened. The government simply introduced plans to charge for water usage. As you say, there was a backlash, albeit only from certain sectors of society. While it did cause the authorities to shelve the charges, it's not correct to say that "everyone" was destroying the new meters; as I recall, there was very little vandalism. The result of this mob rule is that, like Britain, we have been left with an underfunded, ageing, leaky water network that is essentially incapable of supporting further expansion.

metalman 1y ago

Here in Nova Scotia(new scotland), with weather much like, and conected by the jet stream to England, it rained after the longest rainless period ever, yesterday.Normal rainfall is several times a week, or weeks of rain every day, 3 months of no rain is a new thing.We are lucky in that there are thousands of lakes and a system of dams and locks to direct water so shortages are not a problem, yet. Though as we are aprox half the size of England, with 1/56th the population the the urgency in a drout will be less acute. 4 years ago we had unpresedented rain and floods with people getting washed away and killed, roads and bridges destroyed and comunities cut off with damage from that still evident, which would be truely devastating if it were to happen now. Civil engineering calculations were based on max rain bieng 1”/hr, and now there are regular reports of twise and three times that, and I am sure that drout planning was based on now irrelivant tables of average rainfalls and resevoirs sized acordingly. The issue for England is if the will and capacity to build better infrastructure is there, as hydrology is governed by geography and cant be put just anywhere, ie:we are talking water frontage here, dams to raise lakes, and other popular types of projects.Given that it's England, some of the water rights will be written into ancient law, and will be essentialy impossible to override, and then require buy outs of breathtaking proportions. Which leaves tunnel boring machines, sand hawgs, epic infrastructure that has to be built to last forever, and not one but of it suitable to pose in front of.

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philipallstar 1y ago

England's population has been rising far faster than it would naturally rise due to immigration. This means giant sums of money need to be borrowed to fund capital-intensive projects including new energy and water sources. They haven't been done enough on the water side. It's incredibly expensive to have the population increase this fast.

fredley 1y ago
[citation needed] Population growth in the UK is roughly in line with other developed countries. The past few years have been a bit choppy due to global events like the pandemic, but the UK is not an outlier in its population growth.
- intalentive 1y ago
  Population growth in other developed countries is also driven by immigration.
bjoli 1y ago
Always the immigrants. Weird that they are to blame, even though water abstraction has been trending downwards for close to 30 year.
- fredley 1y ago
  > faster than it would naturally Implying migration is 'unnatural'. Which it isn't, humans have migrated as long as they've existed, and without migration the population in the UK would be trending down, which is a very bad problem to deal with.
  - p1dda 1y ago
    It's not a very bad problem, you are just repeating the official narrative
  - philipallstar 1y ago
    > Implying migration is 'unnatural'. This is just silly. Natural population growth is a term. Being the connotation police is entirely unnecessary.

__MatrixMan__ 1y ago

I'm aware that England is not Scotland... But I was in Scotland a few years back (from Colorado) and I was constantly surprised by the incredible amount of water that came out of each faucet whenever I turned it on. Like, I get that nobody wants to wash their hands in a fine mist, but there's a point beyond which more means nothing.

tremon 1y ago
I'm not sure how faucets work in the US, but most valves here in Europe are not binary: you don't have to open them all the way.
- hopelite 1y ago
  It varies, just like across the USA. Some places have low pressure and rate limiting requirements for faucets of various types, other places do not, because they have ample amounts of water. In many places in Europe it is ironically the sewage system that actually depends on high rates of flow to function properly and retrofitting them is effectively not plausible, while also causing sewage issues because water has been made expensive, which then causes lower usage. In other places in Europe you aren’t even able to flush toilet paper because the system cannot handle it. In America, because of the nature of our development we don’t really have the antiquated sewage problem as much, but we have things like septic systems and private wells that are still widely used in places because they are so sparsely populated or even just because connecting into the public sewage system is getting increasingly financially infeasible as the financial chickens come home to roost after squandering ~$100 trillion dollars over 25 years.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  Maybe it was indeed more about the response curve than the max. Never managed to quite pin down the precise steps not taken, but when you grow up in a drought prone place, you notice their absence when elsewhere.

LightBug1 1y ago

Because we were the fools who sold our water off to private companies. And our beautiful private companies did what they do best. Rinsed every pound they could from those companies, and saddled the water companies with debt in order to rinse even more money. And now they're going bankrupt ... or, at best, just staying afloat. Needed capital investment? Long forgotten about ... To do that they'll need to, you know, not raise debt to pay for the capital investment, there isn't any capacity for that. No, they'll need to double peoples water bills to pay for it. And all of this over happened under the watchful eye of a "Regulator". Has been one of the most absolutely disgraceful episodes in UK capitalism. Thanks, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. You're a hero to some ... an absolute disaster to others.

mixxit 1y ago

How many workplace pensions take profits from privatised water company investments?

cogogo 1y ago

I am very curious what the end goal of draining hotel pools as a contingency plan is. In the UK system would that water end up treated and recirculated? My maybe incorrect assumption was a good portion of that water is already a sunk cost.

cramcgrab 1y ago

Fresh water shortages is the new ice age, I meant global warming, I meant climate change. You’ll see, there won’t be any new technology invented for cheap water treatment, only taxes, land grabs, and many politicians elected. Maybe even wars.

alt227 1y ago
> there won’t be any new technology invented for cheap water treatment Oh there will be plenty of new technology invented, but it will either be underinvested, or bought out and buried by competition. Just like how the electricity companies buried Nikola Teslas perpetual motion machines. /s

mattmaroon 1y ago

The frustrating part about this is we now have cheap renewable energy and desalination is viable. Large portions of the world (and our country) are simply going to end up there, so why not start scaling this up now?

MrDrDr 1y ago

This highlights one of the big problems with liberal democracies - how do you provide efficient (and even innovative) public services? There is no free market for many public services like water (and where there is I’m all for privatisation). But the people (I am in the UK) do not tend to elect a government on its ability to manage these types of services. I do wonder if there some other structure that blends a not for profit ethos with employee ownership and just enough competition…

alephnerd 1y ago
> I do wonder if there some other structure that blends a not for profit ethos with employee ownership and just enough competition Legislate that certain public services are to only be managed and administered by the civil service managed and autonomous statutory boards. That's probably the easiest thing to do in a parliamentary system like the UK. Sort of like a "Water Management Board". Not every function in a democracy needs to be democratic in nature. Heck, this is how the UK managed colonial territories like Singapore and HK with the civil service run HDBs, and how a lot of the UK was run before Thatcher's privatization.
- FridayoLeary 1y ago
  That sounds like more quangos? I'm not an expert on them but the way people complain about them, they have a penchant for wasting fantasic amounts of money, and have no accountability even by the standards of the civil service. Politicians are simultaneously engaged in a desperate struggle to close down the defunct ones while opening up more, because they are a great way to avoid responsibility, which of course is one of the major operational goals of the civil service.
  - alephnerd 1y ago
    Not like Quangos - Statutory Boards at least in Singapore are a part of a ministry, but they are given full autonomy [0] to recruit, administer, and manage within their remit as legislated. Quangos are a half assed attempted at doing something similar while trying to include some "inclusion", but with none of the checks and balances. The reality is, not every Tom, Dick, and Harry should have a say on water management or R&D prioritization. [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_boards_of_the_Singapore_Government https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_boards_of_the_Sing...

neuroelectron 1y ago

1. England population reaches ecological balance mediated by thousands-year old social hiarchies 2. Tax base plateaus 3. Import refugees and give them free money to increase tax base 4. Run out of natural resources 5. ? 6. Profit

antonly 1y ago
This is a really shallow and unfounded take. Sad to see this here. This particular issue is imho mostly related to a lack in investment in water infrastructure (reservoirs and pipes). I don't see how migrants factor into this equation (not to mention that the "free money" given to migrants is scarcely a drop in the bucket). Please spread your hatred elsewhere.
- deleted 1y ago
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- neuroelectron 1y ago
  16% As of the 2021 Census, approximately 16% of the population in England and Wales were born outside the UK, which translates to about 10 million people. This figure represents a significant increase from previous years, indicating a growing presence of foreign-born individuals in the country. Wikipedia +1
  - antonly 1y ago
    Woah there, not all foreign born people are refugees. That's some serious misunderstanding you have there. Also, the "foreign born" statistic is pretty moot, seeing as UK was part of the EU until shortly before 2021 with free movement of labour. Most other European countries have higher levels of "foreign born" people living there, e.g. Austria, Germany and Sweden with around 20%[^1]. If you scroll further down, you see that ~half of these people are born within the EU. So yeah, check your biases. [^1]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=EU_population_diversity_by_citizenship_and_country_of_birth https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... Btw, I am "foreign born" within the UK, doing my PhD here in computer science. Most of my colleagues aren't from within the UK either. This is not because of any "policy", there simply is not enough demand from UK students to fill these places. Good luck with your country once you convinced all of us to leave. Have fun drinking your water :)

bjacobel 1y ago

Ctrl-F "AI" Ctrl-F "datacenters" No results.

n8m8 1y ago

My water bill in Texas is insane and they keep building more apartments in places with drought warnings and keep making deals with tech titans to build water-consuming data centers Moving back to Seattle in a few months

Gimpei 1y ago

I feel like this is burying the lede. England needs to adapt to long dry summers? If the water situation can be dealt with, this would make it a more pleasant place to live.

CWIZO 1y ago

It looks like we will be forever looking for solutions when we keep on ignoring animal farming in these conversations. Not even a single mention of the orders of magnitude more of water that is required for animal agriculture vs just growing plants directly for human consumption. Would it solve everything? No. But it would solve a whole lot and the fact that someone that specialises in environmentalism doesn't even mention it shows just how far we are from solving this.

declan_roberts 1y ago
I don't get it. Cattle eat grass. Grass is extraordinarily efficient at using water. It's what would normally be growing there without humans! 70% of the UK is farmland and I'm willing to bet much of that is non-irrigated pasture.
- peterfirefly 1y ago
  > It's what would normally be growing there without humans! A lot of it (most of it, likely) would be forest.
  - declan_roberts 1y ago
    No it would not unless you also removed all grazing animals.

hermitcrab 1y ago

Thatcher's conservative government sold off all the UK's family silver in the 80s. Now we are held to ransom the by the big companies that own these monopolies. It was a short-sighted act with predictably awful consequences and they should never be forgiven for it.

snarf21 1y ago
More poisonous fruit from the Reagan tree.

gaoshan 1y ago

When a resource becomes restricted and is at the same time foundational to life would it not be reasonable to say that it cannot be held for profit?

peterfirefly 1y ago
Commercial food growing works much better than state-owned farms or Party-controlled farms. The Soviet Union had constant problems with insufficient food production. The successor countries didn't.

freen 1y ago

When you put foxes in charge of the henhouse, are you surprised that all the hens will be eaten? Tories think government is the problem, thus when they govern, they break the government, which in turn results in situations like this, which the tories can use to argue that government is the problem.

jhoechtl 1y ago

Thatcherism all the way down.

bethekidyouwant 1y ago

From reading the comments I can’t figure out if it’s because private companies are evil or the gov is incompetent. I suggest both.

Yeul 1y ago

The Netherlands is expected to run out of water in a few decades. Turns out climate change means you end up with a lot of rain in a short time followed with long periods of draught. Not a single Northern European country is equipped for this situation. You have to start building reservoirs up the wazoo.

arduanika 1y ago

An odd fate for an island nation that used to rule the seas. Reminds me of a line from an English poem about the irony of being surrounded on all sides by water, but it's saltwater so you can't drink it.

momiforgot 1y ago

England’s water crisis: decades of underinvestment, privatised firms extracting rents, and a state too broke to fix pipes. Fortunately, the establishment has a brilliant plan: escalate with Russia, trigger a limited nuclear exchange, and get a neat lattice of new reservoirs in the form of fresh craters - conveniently clustered around the Home Counties. As an act of war, NIMBY rules won’t apply. So next time you think war spending is fiscally insane, remember: it’s not waste, it’s water strategy. World-class ingenuity from the people who once ran an empire.

theSherwood 1y ago

I'm really skeptical of the idea that the blame for the lack of water infrastructure ought to be put at the feet of the water companies. The UK's planning system has strangled just about every infrastructure project in every domain. There is a general trend of local residents preventing infrastructure being built in the area, whether it be for water, energy, rail, or roads.

nikanj 1y ago
Vetocracy and nimby are ensuring the country barely shambles on until the boomers croak off. No point in putting up with construction and paying for the investments, if the current infra is juust barely good enough to last until the average voter shuffles off this mortal coil. When the older generations vote reliably and young people are apathetic, you get the current situation

nikanj 1y ago

Same reason as with the housing stock: In a vetocracy, infrastructure does not get built to keep up with a growing population. Not building a single new reservoir for 30 years is bonkers, when the population has grown about 20% and migrated from the rural areas to the cities

BrtByte 1y ago

When infrastructure becomes a profit center, long-term resilience tends to lose out to short-term returns

curtisszmania 1y ago

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catigula 1y ago

There's a magician's trick done when people talk about a problem directly attributable to massive population growth and instead of looking at cause, they look at effect.

sgt101 1y ago
I wondered if anyone would point this out. England's population has risen 25% in my lifetime. Worse, the (perfectly adequate for this level of population) water infrastructure in in the wrong place... It's all in the North East in order to supply steel mills that are no longer there!
- catigula 1y ago
  There's a similar phenomenon in the US when someone talks about "needing to have had built housing", as if this tidal wave of people was just some necessary fact of reality. This is something that was intentionally done and the argument was had and, agree or not, people didn't want it to happen. It happened anyways. Of course, the policy can be reversed.

alexk307 1y ago

> As climate breakdown accelerates, rainfall patterns are changing fast, and water will increasingly become less available at certain times of year. As Sir David King, a former UK chief scientific adviser who chairs the Climate Crisis Advisory Group, says: “Drought in England is no longer a warning. It is a clear signal that climate collapse is unravelling our water, food and natural systems right now. Rainfall over all of the UK has been increasing since 1840 accord to the Met Office [1]. How is a drought a clear signal of collapse if they've been happening since before the industrial revolution? [2] [1] https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-temperature-rainfall-and-sunshine-time-series https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/... [2] https://iahs.info/uploads/dms/13708.88-483-489-81-308-Cole-FRIEND-2006.pdf https://iahs.info/uploads/dms/13708.88-483-489-81-308-Cole-F...

wtbdbrrr 1y ago

3D printers and all that tech around tiny container-sized nuclear plants + all that cool MIT stuff to desalinate water should solve that problem rather quickly, when it becomes a problem, no?

golemiprague 1y ago

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davidf18 1y ago

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mensetmanusman 1y ago

Imagine if government attracted the most competent people.

samathaglen34 1y ago

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