The drought we built

Britain is one of the wettest countries in Europe, and this summer it told people not to water the garden. Weeks of heat and wildfire, reservoirs sinking, hosepipe bans spreading - and beneath the weather, a harder fact the forecast will never mention. The rain that failed to fall is nature's doing. The water that wasn't there to draw on is ours.

Start with the fact that ought to end the argument before it begins. England hasn't finished a major new reservoir since the early 1990s. The one now rising at Havant, in Hampshire, will be the first this country has built in a generation. Across those same years England filled up: by the 2021 census it held 56,489,800 people. More of us, drawing on tanks our grandparents built, and the rain, when it comes, increasingly arrives all at once. You don't need to be an engineer to see where those two lines cross.

So why did the building stop? In 1989 the water of England and Wales was sold to private companies. The promise was the investment a cash-starved state had stopped making. The delivery was mostly dividends. A reservoir is the least appealing thing a water company can put money into: it costs a fortune, it floods a valley that someone calls home, and it pays back long after the executives who signed it off have banked their bonuses and gone. Far easier to squeeze a few more years out of the pipes your predecessors laid, reward the shareholders, and leave the drought to whoever is sitting in the boardroom when it finally arrives.

The companies say they have poured in billions and cut their leaks, and a few of them have. But a business asked to spend a fortune now to head off a shortage years away, on land it must fight through the courts to get, will nearly always find a reason to wait - and ours did, summer after summer.

Then the objectors finished what the balance sheet had begun. We have built a country in which anyone can stop almost anything. A reservoir drowns a valley, and every valley has a village, a rare bird, a treasured view, a society formed to defend it. Each objection, on its own, is reasonable. Their sum is a nation that can hold hearings on a reservoir for a generation and open none of them. We didn't forget how to build. We decided, inquiry by inquiry, that we would rather not.

That decision is what the hosepipe ban truly marks. Somewhere along the line we arranged things so that no one whose name is on the plan is ever still there when the cost arrives: not the company that took the dividend, not the minister who cut a ribbon somewhere drier, not the neighbour who saved his view. The bill lands instead on an ordinary family in a heatwave, holding a watering can they're forbidden to use.

A wet country stood over its emptying reservoirs and blamed the sky - the one part of this whole story that did precisely what it was meant to.

An opinion of the house.