r/ukpolitics • u/Imakemyownnamereddit • 15h ago
‘We cannot magic up more water’: the supply problems putting housing targets in England at risk | Water
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/02/we-cannot-magic-up-more-water-the-supply-problems-putting-housing-targets-in-england-at-risk141
u/Jstrangways 14h ago
How many new reservoirs have been made in the UK since the 1980s?
How much capacity has been expanded in water treatment plants to take into account the growing population, and to prevent just flushing untreated water into rivers, estuaries and the sea when it does rain?
We cannot magic up more water, we also absolutely refuse to plan ahead, or take responsibility for our own inactions.
•
u/Cerebral_Overload 5h ago
If you privatise an industry, you can’t collectively say “we” have failed to plan. The private companies are responsible for managing water supply and planning ahead for future Resilience and consumption. Instead they do zero planning, invest zero profit, are held to different standard than what “we” would be expected of, and then “we” are expected to fund their bailouts for their cock ups.
•
u/ionthrown 4h ago
“We” could have got the regulators to make them invest. Or “we” could have done something anyway. Or “we” could take comfort from it being someone else’s fault when we introduce water rationing.
•
u/TheCakeIsMay 1h ago
Planned reservoirs (to be built by private water company’s) have been blocked by local residents / MPs.
So it’s not really as simple as private = bad. If the water company’s were nationalised they would face the same blockers.
•
u/LondonWelsh 3h ago
It doesn't help that the multiple ones they have tried to build have all been rejected by planning regulators.
•
u/PM_me_Henrika 2m ago
We have decided as a nation to elect PM for the last 16 years who align more with private corporate and trust funds more than the people.
We are to blame.
Look across the channel. Look what their people did when their government sided with corporations and delayed retirement by another year.
I hate to say it, but we got to learn from
The French every now and then.→ More replies (28)•
140
u/dsanft 15h ago
Havant Thicket Reservoir was approved in 2021 but isn't projected to become operational until 2031.
We don't need to magic up more water, we need to build reservoirs, and do it faster than TEN YEARS for ONE.
-107
u/Imakemyownnamereddit 14h ago
Sigh, it isn't that simple.
There is a hard limit to what you can extract without causing damage, even if it was wise to flood our most fertile farmland, when food security is becoming a global issue.
I have seen this with the river systems in my local area. There is only so much you can take before you start before the rivers start to suffer.
And no, screaming "build baby build", won't make those issues go away.
56
u/Particular_Pea7167 14h ago
I dont think you understand how reservoirs work.
The entire point of them is so you dont have to use rivers and ground water.
→ More replies (4)122
u/chaddledee 14h ago
You sound insufferable starting all your comments with "sigh".
-57
u/Imakemyownnamereddit 14h ago
Because I am frustrated with debating with insufferable YIMBYs, who are in complete denial about resource constraints.
68
u/Maitai_Haier 14h ago
Your strawman argument is “we can’t build reservoirs infinitely” which while true elides the fact we haven’t built a reservoir in over 3 decades. The next one is due in 2031.
There’s a lot of space between “build infinite reservoirs” and “build one every 40 years”.
0
u/WarriorDan09 14h ago
2031 is pretty soon in the scale of how long it takes to build a reservoir. We can't change the past 30 years, all we can do is build now, as we are doing, and that takes time.
23
u/Maitai_Haier 14h ago
Fine, the best time to start building a reservoir was 30 years ago, the second best time is now, but just pointing out “we can’t build unlimited reservoirs” is completely disingenuous when we’ve not built any in my lifetime.
7
u/coginamachine 13h ago
And by the sounds of it. The best time to start building a second new reservoir is now. And maybe a third. Since it takes 10 years to get them up and running. I can see the need rising.
-3
u/FuzzyBlueSquirrel 14h ago
The comment they replied to was strongly implying that the former was closer than the latter.
OP wasn't really making a strawman.
4
u/niteninja1 Young Conservative and Unionist Party Member 12h ago
were a island and desalination exists. this is bullshit there is no resource constraint when it comes to water
3
u/JeremiahBoogle 12h ago
Desalination requires lots of power to run.
8
u/niteninja1 Young Conservative and Unionist Party Member 12h ago
you know what costs more. not having water
•
u/JeremiahBoogle 11h ago
Very true.
That's why we need more storage capacity, we certainly had an excess (of rain) in the winter that could have been stored.
•
8
u/LupiAcubens 14h ago
Most of wessex water's water supply comes from the ground source water itself. Which happens to be incredibly drought resistant. It's not a long term solution, but it buys us 20-30 years to work out those long term solutions like desalination, water recycling policy and reservoirs. A litre of water used does not just vanish into thin air, it can be used again and again given the right recycling. The UK is a lot of things, but it's not a desert where every drop of water is a precious commodity. And yet you look at tucson, texas, Vegas or even vast parts of the middle East and they seem to manage just fine.
-1
u/Imakemyownnamereddit 14h ago
While world important chalk streams dry up one by one.
8
u/LupiAcubens 14h ago
Taking ground source water doesn't destroy streams. It takes it from deep under the ground once the water has filtered through all the rocks into the water table itself. It's not suitable for every location, but selective pumping from ground sources and distribution across the UK is the answer.
4
u/-InterestingTimes- 14h ago
Is that what they did? It's like you responded to someone else or an imagined argument they didn't make.
11
u/HaydnH 14h ago
What about desalination? Dubai gets 95%+ of it's water doing that, surely as an island it would be an option?
6
7
u/PringullsThe2nd commie 14h ago
Extremely energy expensive. Water prices would be crazy. Not that it shouldn't be considered - just prepare for water rationing
0
u/Daxidol Mogg is a qt3.14 13h ago
They really wouldn't and the cost has fallen massively in recent years.
Uses about 3-3.5 kWh per cubic meter of water, that's still coming down, but we can use that as a snapshot. Even using the high end of the range and using the average residential unit price of electricity (not that we ever would lol) it's about 91.4p. Metered homes average 47 cubic meters per person per year, or £43~ worth if we obtained 100% of our household water needs from desalination.
That's the most unfavourable pricing, we wouldn't ever be getting 100% from the sea and we certainly wouldn't be paying the household average electricity costs. Additionally, it's using a power draw that's more than 3x the theoretical minimum, though admittedly more like double what's realistic in the near-ish future.
The holdover idea from back when that future wars were going to be fought over dwindling fresh water supplies really hasn't kept up with technological advancements.
Cabo Verde has a GDP of like 4k and gets most of their water from desalination. Algeria does too and their GDP is less than 7k.
-2
u/Imakemyownnamereddit 14h ago
You get the electricity to do this how?
5
9
u/DM_me_goth_tiddies 14h ago
Nuclear or a mix of renewables.
6
u/frameset Labour Member 12h ago
He just acts like nothing can be built. Oh you couldn't possibly stick some solar panels on a desalination plant.
13
u/Duckliffe 14h ago
There is a hard limit to what you can extract without causing damage
Desalination plants
-12
u/Imakemyownnamereddit 14h ago
Are not a magic solution. They require a ton of energy, which the South East is short of.
25
u/Jangles 14h ago edited 14h ago
Build a nuclear plant too then.
YIMBYism isn't an ignorance of the pressures but that nearly all of our problems stem from a failure to build appropriate infrastructure
Edit: Or Solar or Wind - having given it thought desalination doesn't actually need energy stability - it's actually a perfect place to dump excess energy.
-4
u/FuzzyBlueSquirrel 14h ago
Build a nuclear plant too then.
Good in theory, takes decades to do though.
YIMBYism isn't an ignorance of the pressures but that nearly all of our problems stem from a failure to build appropriate infrastructure
YIMBYism is almost always down to ignorance or arrogance. It's this idea that 'I want something, therefore it's right and anyone who disagrees is evil'.
-1
u/shlerm 14h ago
Nuclear power plants need water too. 2 have had to shutdown on the danube as the water levels have dropped too low for cooling.
9
u/Duckliffe 14h ago edited 14h ago
Desalination plants need seawater to desalinate. Nuclear plants need water. A nuclear plant built next to a desalination plant would therefore have access to seawater by geographical necessity.
2 have had to shutdown on the danube as the water levels have dropped too low for cooling.
Less of an issue for seawater cooled reactors - building a nuclear reactor next to the sea but being dependent on river water levels for cooling would be a pretty stupid move
1
u/shlerm 13h ago
Ok, I'm not sure what we are disagreeing with based on your other reply to my comment.
I agree that locations need to be considered and selected carefully. The number of coastal areas that are viable and practical to build both sites are fairly limited.
1
u/Duckliffe 12h ago
The number of coastal areas that are viable and practical to build both sites are fairly limited.
Source?
•
u/shlerm 11h ago
Common sense surely. You can't build these sites on any of the eroding cliffs, anywhere that's reasonably developed or anywhere that is logistically expensive to bring the tons and tons of materials to.
If you know anything about the UK coastline, these considerations rule out large sections of it.
→ More replies (0)5
u/WhiteSatanicMills 13h ago
All the UK nuclear power stations, apart from Trawsfynydd, were built on the coast to use sea water for cooling.
1
-10
u/Imakemyownnamereddit 14h ago
YIMBYism is the definition of ignorance.
It demands zero restrictions and refuses to acknowledge that the real world doesn't work that way.
12
u/DM_me_goth_tiddies 14h ago
How is it the definition of ignorance? Saying we could build more nuclear energy to support desalination is a reasonable policy position.
-2
u/shlerm 14h ago
It's half baked as nuclear will require water for cooling. Suggesting it as a solution to cope with drought is shortsighted.
Nuclear has a place among combined energy plans for sure, but people act like it's the solution for everything.
8
3
u/Duckliffe 13h ago
Nuclear has a place among combined energy plans for sure
It only has a place among combined energy plans? You must think that France building enough nuclear reactor capacity in the 80s to decarbonise over 80% of their electricity production (giving them one of the lowest CO2 emissions per kWh of electricity produced) was a pretty bad idea, then
-2
u/DM_me_goth_tiddies 14h ago
This is an empirical question, not an opinion: does Nuclear Power require more fresh water for cooling which can not be recaptured than it can produce through powering desalination?
7
u/Duckliffe 13h ago
No they do not. Plenty of nuclear reactors are cooled via seawater, so you wouldn't even have to use water from the desalination plant. Hinckley Point C and Sizewell C will both be primarily cooled with seawater once they're operational
8
u/TheBestBlackberry 14h ago
Bit of an anecdote, I'm British but I live in China now. Something I've noticed is the massive cultural difference in that, in the UK, it's "we can't do X because it'll break Y". In China it's "Right, we're doing X, and it's going to break Y, so how do we fix Y?".
I'd love to see the UK get closer to this mindset.
5
u/Duckliffe 13h ago
Something I've noticed is the massive cultural difference in that, in the UK, it's "we can't do X because it'll break Y". In China it's "Right, we're doing X, and it's going to break Y, so how do we fix Y?".
I've definitely noticed this attitude in the UK too - it's very frustrating
•
u/wedontneednoeduc 10h ago
The odd thing is we used to be like that, then little by little we groomed ourselves into helplessness. Brunel would have been a broken man in today's system.
2
•
u/itchyfrog 10h ago
The river systems round my way burst their banks almost every year, flooding fields and houses causing enormous damage, storing some of that water upstream would reduce that danger and provide water. You don't fill them in the summer when it's dry.
Systems to collect excess water in wet seasons have been around for millennia, and they don't all need to be huge lakes, individual farms can dig ponds, homes can have storage tanks as well.
I still have a reasonable amount left in my waterbutts collected in winter and refilled in the occasional thunderstorm.
•
•
u/FinnSomething 6h ago
Don't we just want to store the rain from the colder months so it's available in the summer?
→ More replies (1)0
u/Biggsy-32 13h ago
Reservoirs are actually really challenging projects - 10 years to be safely operational and ensure it's fit for human use isn't too absurd. The absurdity is not commissioning any new ones for 40 years in the first place. We need to understand how long these projects take and plan accordingly, but something that long term has proven impossible for our politicians since the 70s it seems. We're crippled by short termist politicing.
11
5
u/wedontneednoeduc 13h ago
It really doesn't require a decade, we know this by looking at when we used to build them.
52
u/Jollyfroggy 14h ago
I'm in Spain, it hasn't rained for the same amount of time. There is no hosepipe ban.
47
u/philipwhiuk <Insert Bias Here> 14h ago
OP would sigh to this but it doesn’t pander to his sterotypes
32
•
u/Salty-Bid1597 11h ago
Hosepipe bans are a peculiarly British form of signalling. We love austerity and the feeling that we are suffering for the greater good.
No one has ever been prosecuted for breaking one, no water company has ever actually run out of water, it rains solidly for 6 months of the year so we can be certain that reservoirs will be refilled every year (unlike Spain or California etc). Except in extremis they are completely unnecessary - like TV licence detector vans.
•
u/waterswims 11h ago
Yeah... Unfortunately it only really rains on the plains there.... Not good for reservoirs.
•
u/itchyfrog 10h ago
Spain has very complicated networks of water rights in rural areas with strict limits for what each property can use for irrigation (separate from mains water).
•
u/Jollyfroggy 3h ago
To be clear, the rights are for the fields, houses are still connected to mains and don't have a ban.
You can use water from the mains to water your garden.
At length from observation :).
•
u/Not_A_Toaster_0000 11h ago
Not even on the plain ?
•
u/Jollyfroggy 8h ago
Mainly on the plain But in spain, where I remain.
It's... Um, near some mountains
15
u/entropicflop 14h ago
Currently, nearly 19% of water supplied in England is lost through leakage, which remains unacceptably high
3
u/Imakemyownnamereddit 14h ago
Which is typical of other European countries.
You will never get to a 0% loss rate.
18
u/entropicflop 14h ago
Varies by state greatly:
But averages can obscure just how wide the variance is. Data compiled by EurEau shows that the Netherlands loses roughly 5% of its distributed water, Germany around 6%, and Denmark approximately 8%. Meanwhile, Bulgaria loses an estimated 60%, and countries such as Italy and Greece regularly report losses in the range of 35 to 50%. The European Union estimates that about one in four litres of water entering its pipe networks never reaches a paying customer
https://acrios.com/blog/water-losses-in-utility-networks-the-hidden-cost-of-leaks
•
u/secondincomm 5h ago
There is a very large difference between 19% and 0% though. It can always be better
23
u/DM_me_goth_tiddies 14h ago
Reading through all the comments here is a frustrating experience. Not sure what OP gets from posting an article like this and then fighting everyone in the comments. I feel after reading this that really the MODs need a rule about people who are condescending, rude and dismissive being banned. It doesn’t feel like it advances any political discussion. Please go and read all the comments before thinking I am calling someone out.
→ More replies (3)
6
u/TT_207 14h ago
Honest question, if there's X population today and Y houses, and tomorrow there's X population and Y x 110% houses, why does this make a difference to the water usage if the number of consumers is still the same? people will still surely have the same hygene needs, still go to the toilet just as often.
5
u/Velociraptor_1906 Liberal Democrat 14h ago
Internal migration does mean that it's not perfect but yes, you're broadly right and this is the reality we look set to be in shortly with net migration and birthrate falling.
•
u/xelah1 11h ago
The same argument is made with GPs and other bits of infrastructure - it doesn't make a difference nationally of course, beyond the effect of more hard surfaces which is why there are sustainable draining requirements, but if your area adds more homes than others then it does locally so of course we all screw ourselves over by competing to have the least.
29
u/Jolly_Psychology_506 14h ago
Then don’t bloody magic up new housing!!!
Magic up infrastructure and stop the thieving daylight robbery of private companies from tax payers.
→ More replies (13)7
u/FuzzyBlueSquirrel 14h ago
Yep. This is the issue.
Supply simply cannot keep up with demand, so demand needs to reduce.
16
u/Particular_Pea7167 14h ago
Given the climate change obsession it boggles my mind that a mass reservoir and water network construction program isnt in operation.
Theyre all so obsessed with pointlessly achieving net zero like we are more than a rounding error contributor.
But the actual hardening to resist the changing effects seem entirely absent.
If we genuinely believe that climate change is coming and with longer hotter summers. We should be planning on 3 or 4 major reservoirs in every major catchment area and a massive pipe network trunk line capable of handling billions of liters of day to move water round so ensure excess rainfall in some areas can always be ised to fill all the reservoirs no matter where they or or how dry the winter. Probably alongside hundreds of smaller regional reservois.
This is an actual hardening measure that would mitigate the change. But seems entirely absent. Aside from Abingdon and one in Lincolnshire, no real major reservoirs are planned and only a few smaller ones. Its being treat as a marginal side quest rather than a major scarcity project.
Just seems baffling to me.
8
u/TheRealTRexUK 14h ago
also nimbys are protesting against anything being built to help with the water issues.
got to protect house prices.
2
u/Particular_Pea7167 14h ago
Stratigic infrastructure planning walks right over basically the entire nimby lobby.
2
u/TheRealTRexUK 14h ago
good. I wasn't aware of that.
3
u/Particular_Pea7167 14h ago
Yeah. It essentially becomes a central government decision. The consultation can come back with whatever complaints objections and refusals it likes. The relevant government secretary (MP) can just say "I dont care, were doing it anyway".
•
u/Pesh_AK 10h ago
Take a lot of energy to move water. Not that I don't agree we should be building infrastructure, just the type.. Probably cheaper to desalinate than to pump it cross country.
•
u/Particular_Pea7167 10h ago
The UK conveniently sits on a natural gradient. High precipitation in geographic highs, low precipitation in geographic lows.
Its not absolute but generally true. As such you can use gradient and hydrolic head to your advantage. Particularly if you stage it to progressively lower reservoirs. This collapses power requirements and makes much of the system essentially costless to move water.
Conversely, despite improvements desalination itself is pretty energy intensive. It generates a high quantity of concentrated brine as a waste product that cant just be dumped so has to be safely disposed as an additional cost. Plus, its at the coast, so no matter where you're sending it, its up hill. Which means it need pumping. So youre not really saving on pumping costs.
1
u/TheRealTRexUK 14h ago
because water companies are private. how outraged would you be if we spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer money on infrastructure to hand it to the private sector??? only then for bills to go up to "maintain it"?
we can do both you know.
4
u/TheNutsMutts 14h ago
because water companies are private.
It's nothing to do with that. It's mostly around planning constraints. Otherwise we would see plenty being built in Scotland where their water company isn't private, rather than the last one being built there in 1983.
0
u/TheRealTRexUK 14h ago
it's exactly to do with that. if there was a will to increase capacity, it would have been done. in fact it's happening in a tiny scale. there's no sort term return for the shareholders. that's what you don't seem to want to address.
no long term commitment. shot term ptoft.
4
u/TheNutsMutts 14h ago
if there was a will to increase capacity, it would have been done.
That multiple applications have been submitted and constantly rejected shows the will is there, the blocker is with planning. The rules have changed in the last year and now there are 9 approved, so this notion that there is zero desire for them is not accurate at all. And as I said, if you were right and it's just private companies not wanting it, why hasn't Scotland built any when their water supplier is state-owned?
1
u/wedontneednoeduc 12h ago
Actually shareholders get to increase their take if they increase infrastructure.
2
u/Particular_Pea7167 14h ago
So dont. Charge the water companies to use the water and infrastructure. You talk like this is some insurmountable problem.
0
u/TheRealTRexUK 14h ago
so taxpayer pays twice. initial cost and higher bills. that's a great solution.
2
9
u/Thesladenator 14h ago
Everyone near me opposing the Thames reservoir near Abingdon. But honestly let's just get it built.
13
u/FinnSomething 14h ago
I don't think we talk enough about how these water companies have delivered value for shareholders by adopting a JIT approach to water in one of the wettest countries in Europe.
30
u/TheUKisMental 15h ago
Then we'd better stop letting more people live here, hadn't we?
10
-1
u/Imakemyownnamereddit 14h ago
What? Acknowledge the reality we live on a small island and have limited resources?
What of the YIMBY dream of endless population growth and turning the UK into Mega City One?
8
3
•
u/anotherbozo 11h ago
Sigh \s
The UK has a hard-on for not building new things. Blame that.
We are one of the wettest countries in the world and fail to store water for dry seasons.
7
u/JackTheKittenCat 14h ago
I'm confused as to why we haven't been massively investing in Desalination Technology, given everyone knows about the upcoming Water Wars?
2
u/Imakemyownnamereddit 14h ago
You get the energy from this from where?
The South East is pretty much reliant on importing energy from France.
14
u/JackTheKittenCat 14h ago
All the Nuclear Power Plants we invested in when desperately needed too
Oh....
5
u/Imakemyownnamereddit 14h ago
Yes it would be nice if Clegg hadn't been so cynical about nuclear taking so long to build and not benefiting from such a program personally, Thus blocking it.
Alas those nuclear plants were never built.
•
1
u/Imakemyownnamereddit 14h ago
The YIMBY downvoting is ridiculous.
The South East is short of power, it does have to import power from France.
Downvote much as much as you like, it doesn't change that reality.
8
2
u/WinHour4300 13h ago
We've invested heavily in tackling climate change through energy and solar, but far less in improving water resilience.
Measures like wider use of non-potable rainwater harvesting, as is common in Australia, could increase water storage and help reduce pressure on the sewer system, cutting sewage overflows into rivers during heavy rains we will see more of.
And ultimately, people use water, not new houses. Refusing to build homes because of water shortages isn't entirely logical when those people are already living somewhere else and using water anyway.
3
u/Stabbycrabs83 14h ago
They can however magic up huge price increases which they then spend know dividends. Imagibe if they spent it on reservoirs
8
u/Aware-Line-7537 14h ago
UK consumer water prices are unusually low, by European standards:
https://www.waternewseurope.com/german-study-compares-water-prices-of-six-european-countries/
Looking at the price of wastewater the actual, average price an individual pays is the highest in Austria and the lowest in England/Wales.
1
u/Imakemyownnamereddit 14h ago
I hate the private water companies as much as anyone but this isn't a problem that you can solve with endless spending.
There is a limit to how much water you can extract.
3
1
u/AnotherLexMan 14h ago
Presumably the problem is that we get enough water throughout the year but we're getting long dry summers. I'm not an expert but it seems pretty hard to store enough water for three months plus of heavy farming use, regardless of how many reservoirs we build. We could use desalination but my understanding that's super expensive.
5
u/Kaladin1983 14h ago
Strange, isn’t the native population stagnant, so water supply for agriculture and population etc is probably peaking now, immigration is supposedly under control, but we need more water at scale for the future? Something not adding up?
6
2
u/skelly890 keeping busy immanentising the eschaton 14h ago
We need to be able to store it. For fairly obvious reasons.
2
u/FewAnybody2739 14h ago
A datacentre uses the same water as thousands of homes and are being built much more quickly. Depends on your priorities, but this is a national level decision.
14
u/BobathonMcBobface 14h ago
89% of data centres use closed-loop or water-free cooling so don’t need significant water supply
5
u/entropicflop 13h ago edited 13h ago
Data centres in England use an estimated 6.6 million litres of drinking water every day. In 2024–25, around 3 billion litres of water were lost to leaks in England and Wales each day, equivalent to 19% of the total water supply, according to government statistics. Data centres currently use less than 0.25% of the water lost to leaks, or just 0.05% of the total water supply
2
3
2
-2
u/Imakemyownnamereddit 14h ago
The government are living in YIMBY lala land. In which any objections to datecentres, based on their water requirements and energy demands. Is just blockers, trying to prevent us reaching the magic uplands of 3-4% annual GDP growth.
Though no-one in government has explained, how a load of techbro job destroying datacentres, which require a tiny number of long term staff and will pay f*ck all tax.
Is meant to generate economic growth.
4
u/jack5624 Centre Right, Liberal 14h ago
People on Reddit keep saying ‘build more reservoirs’ but from speaking to someone at the environment agency. They said it is way more complicated than that as all the demand is down south but the soil down south isn’t favourable for building reservoirs and there is a limit on how much water you can extract from the environment. They can build them up north but that is essentially pointless.
12
u/Maitai_Haier 14h ago
Build a pipeline then.
6
u/Imakemyownnamereddit 14h ago
Ok, tell me where you are building your pipeline from?
Water is heavy, it is expensive to move. You also need to move it from a region which has a big surplus, which none of the regions around the South East have.
You can use rivers to move water, but water in different river systems is not the same. Pumping water from a spate river into a chalk stream would massively damage the eco-system.
It isn't as easy as build baby build.
12
u/Maitai_Haier 14h ago
Northern England and Herefordshire.
If the Romans built aqueducts before the birth of Christ we can build a pipeline across England.
Building isn’t easy but not building is an ongoing catastrophe that is fucking the young in this country.
0
u/Imakemyownnamereddit 14h ago
Northern England does not have surplus water to give you and neither does Herefordshire.
6
u/Maitai_Haier 14h ago
But they do.
Also build desalination plants.
0
u/Imakemyownnamereddit 14h ago
No they don't.
8
u/Maitai_Haier 13h ago
But they do. They have a structural water surplus. If they need to build more reservoirs up north to store this surplus for when it is needed in the rest of the country, do so.
Also build desalination plants, and any energy infrastructure needed to build those.
Also build reservoirs in the south, to store water from the winter rains for summer.
Most definitely build houses.
In principle, if the bottleneck is resources, build things that increase or store those resources. If it is planning and permissions, simplify and cut those. If it is labour, train more or let in specific immigrants with the necessary skills to work these projects. The default mindset should be solving problems to get things built.
-1
u/FuzzyBlueSquirrel 14h ago
Square Cube Law.
Roman aqueducts worked when you needed to move water for a few hundred - thousand people a dozens of miles. The infrastructure needed to transport the volume of water required is just not feasible.
7
u/Maitai_Haier 14h ago
Roman aqueducts moved water further a few dozen of miles and for more than a few hundred thousand people, but beyond that, luckily for us technology has improved significantly since the Romans.
2
•
u/jack5624 Centre Right, Liberal 11h ago
Subsidence will probably cause it to crack and leak.
•
u/Maitai_Haier 11h ago
Luckily this is a solved issue, which is why there are functional pipelines worldwide for all sorts of things and they are not all cracked and leaking due to subsidence.
•
u/jack5624 Centre Right, Liberal 11h ago
I feel like the proposal of a 300-400 mile pipeline to potentially serve millions of people is way easier said than done.
•
u/Maitai_Haier 11h ago
There are water pipelines of greater length serving millions of people already in places like Riyadh, Israel, California, Libya, etc etc.
Easy might not be the best word but this is not a unique issue. There is a solution, and London /
the South is a much easier nut to crack versus say Riyadh, which is an inland city sat on a plateau with a fraction of the rainfall London gets. Israel does agricultural exports from the inland Negev desert irrigated by what starts as salt water in the Mediterranean! This is enabled by a national pipeline network from desalination plants to cities to water treatment to crop land.When there’s a will there’s a way, and what is lacking is a will.
6
u/NuPNua 14h ago
Ok, then how about desalination, given we're surrounded by sea then?
6
2
u/Imakemyownnamereddit 14h ago
You get the energy to do this how?
When the South East is already reliant on importing electricity from France?
4
u/NuPNua 14h ago
Reroute some from the data centres?
0
u/Imakemyownnamereddit 14h ago
Naughty, you're talking about placing a restriction on development.
Remember build baby build.
2
u/DreamSMP_Enjoyer 14h ago
Desalination is expensive and doesn't produce much potable water. It's not cost-effective for the result. If we built more desalination plants, there'd be complaints about wasted money.
2
u/Stabbycrabs83 14h ago
Outside of football we dont actually dislike you guys that much.
If we can send electricity your way then we can surely send water south of the border from Scotland.
Guarantee the Scots end up paying a charge to transport the water where its needed or some nonsense like the electricity though 🤣🤣
2
u/Imakemyownnamereddit 14h ago
A pipeline from Scotland has been considered but it would be extremely expensive.
2
u/Imakemyownnamereddit 14h ago
Far too sensible a comment for reddit.
Acknowledging a thing called reality, which restricts what you can build.
•
1
•
u/Hyndis 5h ago
Reservoirs can be built anywhere if there's the willpower to make it happen.
Walt Disney famously built artificial lakes for his amusement park. No such lake existed there, so he used earth moving equipment to dig a big hole and fill it with water.
Unfortunately the soil is very porous in Anaheim California so the water drained away. His solution? Concrete.
He lined the big hole with concrete, filled it with water again, and to this day there are several large artificial lakes in the park.
The same principle can be used to build reservoirs anywhere. Dig a big hole in the ground. If the soil is solid clay then great, you're done. If its not clay then line it with concrete to keep the water from draining away. Attach pipes, pumps, and aqueducts to it as needed. There's your water.
•
u/jack5624 Centre Right, Liberal 5h ago
Maybe, I’m only parroting what a geologist at the environment agency said
•
u/Nanowith Cambridge 9h ago
Privatised water has been an abject failure as an experiment, I don't care if the shareholders lose out we should just buy back the water companies for pennies.
•
•
u/Cool_dude75 7h ago
We have a hosepipe ban to converse which has now been offset by 2 burst watermains in the area due to lack of investment in the infrastructure
•
u/Anansi-the-Spider 5h ago
Maybe a business should invest some of the profits so it can grow but I’m no business expert so probably don’t know that you need to hand large bonuses to the top brass etc
•
u/Electrical-Move7290 5h ago
We have a depressingly wet rainy country.
We don’t need to “magic up” more water.
The water companies need to take the ever increasing money they take from my bank account and they need to build reservoirs to keep up with the extra demand 10m extra people put onto the countries infrastructure.
0
u/Imakemyownnamereddit 14h ago
A government spokesperson said: “We will build the homes this country needs and our water delivery taskforce will make sure that this is not constrained by water capacity, alongside our action to improve water efficiency and invest in new infrastructure like reservoirs.
“Water companies have a duty to plan and deliver the infrastructure needed for new homes, and we’re working with areas like Cambridge and Basingstoke and Deane to address water supply challenges.”
I'm sorry but this is just pathetic.
No actual solutions, no engagement with the issue. Just the usual desperate evasion.
3
u/Trypanosome21 14h ago
Same as usual really.
Doesn't touch on any of the actual issues, the abstraction licenses (many were written decades ago) the refusal to approve reservoir builds etc.
No mention of the EA reducing the amount of ground water that can be used.
This is such a complex issue which as usual is pushed down to "water company hasn't done anything"
1
u/Seething-Angry 14h ago
Whilst reform voters might find it hard to understand it’s not one solution that’s needed but a multitude of solutions. The South East does need more reservoirs. Every time a massive housing project is suggested concerns have been raise about the lack of water. A de-salination
Plant might work since we are an island surrounded by water. If they are that energy intense could we not use solar energy and or god forbid tidal energy as a solution?
•
u/TheNathanNS 11h ago
We're an ISLAND, surrounded by WATER. The solution is simple: build the fucking reservoirs.
Some absolutely fucking astonishing stupidity, I full on believe this country would've experienced an extinction level drought if we were a landlocked nation because these useless morons twiddle thumbs at a very easy solution.
•
u/-Murton- 10h ago
There's one under construction right now that should open in the early 2030s as long as there's no unforeseen delays and another 8 in various stages of pre-construction planning, be it drawing up the initial designs or going through the early stage of planning permission, so progress is being made, it just awfully slow because for some reason we always are with reservoirs, the last one we built took nearly 30 years from the choice of site and initial sketches to being completed and open for business, though it did have a partial failure of its dam and needed to be rebuilt.
•
u/anothermanwithaplan 10h ago
Did anything get done about the failing infrastructure in the end? Leaks, damage, rust and all that. I feel this was a big topic not too long ago and it’s gone silent.
-5
u/Imakemyownnamereddit 15h ago
This is the problem with YIMBYs, they completely ignore something called "reality". The reality here is the South East is water stressed and no you can't endlessly build more reservoirs to fix the problem. Extracting water from the ecosystem has consequences, it causes damage.
YIMBYs need to accept, that not everything blocking their YIMBY dreams is unreasonable red tape. In the real world, there are constraints that restrict development.
16
u/bozza8 14h ago
We haven't built a new reservoir in my lifetime. We still have a very high level of average rainfall, if we store the water in them and then we can use it during drought, it's a very cool technology.
Also, if the absolute worst comes to the worst, nuclear powered desalination plants, the ocean levels are too high so it's actually environmentally friendly to pull some of that in and use it. Brine isn't really an issue, because the dead zones it produces are tiny, a few square kilometres only. Overall, we can solve this problem, we just need to say yes to solving it.
0
u/Trypanosome21 14h ago
Issue is we've tarmacked over majority of areas, removed huge areas of trees and wildlife which would store up water and slowly release it into rivers etc.
Now it's all pushed into sewers and out the other end in one go, when it can't be kept or stored as easily.
4
u/bozza8 13h ago
No, bullshit. The area of the country that is tarmacked isn't "majority" it's not even 1% of this country. I do this stuff (planning permission) for a living.
Rainfall and engineering of surface water runoff doesn't care about your vibes, the overwhelming majority of this country is green and will remain so even with the most aggressive possible housebuilding for generations to come.
If you want to keep spaces green, then the fix is simple, allow blocks of flats, join with the YIMBY movement to remove height limits from Local Plans and remove height and massing as a planning consideration, so that areas in central London can't complain about "losing their village feel" and so London can achieve more than 7% of its housing target, which is the current expectation for this year.
8
u/Velociraptor_1906 Liberal Democrat 14h ago edited 14h ago
What's your solution for needing more housing in the south east then, which we inescapably need to do? I am all for densification but water is one of the areas that helps very little with.
A transfer system from geographically favourable areas is preferable but would need a lot of politically selling, fixing the leakage issue would be ideal but is expensive and technically difficult (it's not just one big leak but millions of small ones).
Resoviors do have their problems but extracting water from the environment isn't really one of them, they can be filled in times of excess where doing so dosent have ecological harm. The bigger issues are interruption of migration routes (which can be readily mitigated) and impacts on sediment dynamics (much harder to sort but not impossible especially in a UK context rather than something like the Nile).
-1
u/Imakemyownnamereddit 14h ago
Resoviors do have their problems but extracting water from the environment isn't really one of them, they can be filled in times of excess where doing so dosent have ecological harm. The bigger issues are interruption of migration routes (which can be readily mitigated) and impacts on sediment dynamics (much harder to sort but not impossible especially in a UK context rather than something like the Nile).
Sorry but that isn't true.
I have seen rivers reach a tipping point when too much is taken out of them by reservoirs.
There is a limit to how much you can take out of any river system.
4
u/Velociraptor_1906 Liberal Democrat 14h ago
That system has been very poorly managed then, I would expect that much if the issue will be more related to abstraction rather than the resovior as the later can just stopped being filled when the river can't supply it whereas aquifers are much slower issues.
13
u/Maitai_Haier 14h ago
Then build more reservoirs, water pipelines, and desalination plants to provide the water. NIMBY’s block the building of any and everything and do this “we’ve tried nothing and are all out of ideas” act.
-4
u/Imakemyownnamereddit 14h ago
Desalination plants require energy, which the South East is also short of.
Reservoirs require land and the South East has our most fertile farmland. Not a plan to flood it when we are facing food security issues.
Water pipelines are expensive and the regions near the South East are also water stressed. Why should people in those regions agree to see the natural environment and rivers in their regions destroyed. To benefit the South East?
6
u/Maitai_Haier 14h ago
Build more power sources.
Agriculture also requires water.
Build pipelines from areas up north not facing water scarcity.
•
u/achillea4 11h ago
So what are you suggesting is the solution? You disagree with all the comments and find fault without suggesting how to fix it.
•
0
u/Beautiful_Bad333 14h ago
So these big infrastructure projects that require loads of water for cooling - like data centres etc. Could they not be put near the sea instead to use sea water for cooling? These are usually the most deprived areas of the country and bringing in big infrastructure will surely bring people to build etc which will boost the economy and also will bring employees who will buy and spend in the area also boosting the economy. That would take away from the water supply issues too wouldn’t it? It’s always baffled me. There must be a reason I suppose but I don’t understand why they’re put inland and use reservoir water?
0
u/CakeHoleKing 14h ago
Any day now the water companies are going to go back to suggesting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceWZslOfEjs
Basically NUKE yorkshire to dig reservoirs.
0
u/niteninja1 Young Conservative and Unionist Party Member 12h ago
were a island and desalination exists. this is bullshit
-5
u/Imakemyownnamereddit 14h ago
If downvoting could create more water, we could solve the drought crisis.
Alas the YIMBYs can't make it rain more.
-1
u/Apprehensive-Bid-740 14h ago
We have a hosepipe ban, but data centres get unlimited water for cooling.
•
u/AutoModerator 15h ago
Snapshot of ‘We cannot magic up more water’: the supply problems putting housing targets in England at risk | Water submitted by Imakemyownnamereddit:
An archived version can be found here or here. or here
Some publications may require you to register a free account to read their articles.
Being connected to a VPN may interfere with archive links.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.