Ladybower Reservoir in the Peak District (Credit: Colin Mitchell / Alamy Stock Photo)

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Look at a map of England’s most water stressed regions and it’s immediately striking just how much of the country is coloured bright red.

All of London, East Anglia, the South East, and most of the Midlands – along with Dorset, Wiltshire and much of Somerset and Gloucestershire – is classified as seriously water stressed by the Environment Agency.

It means more than 65 per cent of England’s population is living in areas where the water supply is under severe strain, and as droughts become more common with each summer that passes, the risk of shortages is growing worse.

We’re piping water from north Wales down into England, and then across England to east Kent. That’s crazy

What’s more, if the situation is this bad now, how will the nation cope with another 1.5m homes, each needing taps, showers and toilets consuming an average of 150 litres per person, per day?

The government’s answer is more reservoirs. Britain hasn’t built one since 1992, when the late Queen Elizabeth II opened Carsington Water in Derbyshire.

Julia Buckley, the Labour MP for Shrewsbury and a member of the Water All-Party Parliamentary Group, argues that this has partly been the result of transforming the water industry into private companies.

“Their focus on profit has meant that they haven’t done that long-term planning, because it’s not an immediate return on investment for them,” she says, adding that the same is true of sewage being discharged into rivers.

“It’s really two sides of the same coin… We only get sewage being dumped where the infrastructure is inadequate. Whether that’s because we’ve built more houses, or because we didn’t put the right pipes down in the first place, all of those issues all come from the same problem.”

In a speech in January, Rachel Reeves acknowledged that the UK’s poor water infrastructure has proved “a major hindrance to development”.

The Chancellor hopes to accelerate the construction of nine new reservoirs, located in Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Oxfordshire, Suffolk, Kent, East Sussex, the West Midlands, and two in Somerset. Together, they are expected to supply an extra 670m litres of water per day. (A 10th reservoir, at Havant Thicket in Hampshire, received planning permission under the previous government and is due to open in 2031.)

For Roger Gale, the Conservative MP for Herne Bay and Sandwich, these new facilities – especially the one at Broad Oak in Kent – can’t come soon enough. Gale has been calling for a reservoir in his patch for over 40 years, a campaign which has spanned almost his entire parliamentary career.

“Water companies have a statutory duty to provide water, and that is not linked, practically, to the number of houses that are being built,” he says. “A system that was designed 50 or 60 years ago is now no longer viable for the number of houses that we are having foisted on us.”

He adds: “We’re piping water from north Wales down into England, and then across England to east Kent. That’s crazy. It’s just stupid, so what we need is what I said 40 years ago.”

Dr Jess Neumann, an associate professor of hydrology at Reading University, cautions that while more reservoirs are welcome, major obstacles still stand in the way of getting them built. “Don’t get me wrong, nine new reservoirs is good news,” she tells The House. “It’s definitely needed. We need to be able to have more resilience, particularly to climate change – this ability to be able to store water for when we need it, because the weather is so much more unpredictable.

“We can have winters with hardly any rain, and that means we just don’t have the supply to deal with the summers, when people want to water their gardens.

“So yes, reservoirs are one way of doing it… but they’re very expensive. They have a lot of public and local opposition. They potentially completely change a landscape – the cultural and physical landscape for people. They’re very difficult to get through the planning process.”

Gale points out that many of England’s reservoirs, from Kielder Water in Northumberland to Rutland Water in the East Midlands, were resisted at the planning stage, but have since become treasured leisure and nature destinations.

Yet Buckley, Gale and Neumann all argue that reservoirs cannot be the only answer to England’s water problem.

“There needs to be huge investment in the Victorian pipe network that our water companies have basically relied on for decades,” says Neumann. “We lose so much through leaky pipes, leaky infrastructure, water literally just running out over the road sometimes.”

Within households too, there is a lot of potential to cut down on wasted water, if there was greater public awareness of the “small things that we can all do to make a very big difference”, Neumann adds.

“Things like turning off the tap when we’re brushing our teeth, or not flushing the toilet as much, or taking showers instead of baths,” she says. “It doesn’t sound like much as an individual, but when you scale that up by millions and millions of people, it’s a huge amount of water.”

Unlike countries such as Cyprus, Japan and Jordan, the UK has not widely adopted ‘grey water’ recycling systems which enable domestic wastewater to be reused to flush toilets and water gardens.

“If you have a grey water system that flushes the lavatory, designing it into the house to use grey water – so that you don’t have to make a choice, it just happens – that in itself would save millions of gallons of water every day,” says Gale.

Neumann agrees: “If we look at other countries like Cyprus, they’re reusing 97 per cent of their water, so why are we not doing it?”

She emphasises the need for a joined-up approach to address the challenge of not only ensuring sufficient water supply, but also improving water quality and tackling flooding caused by climate change.

In an effort to provide that approach, Environment Secretary Steve Reed announced the creation of an Independent Water Commission in October last year.

Chaired by the Bank of England’s former deputy governor Sir Jon Cunliffe, this new body will make recommendations on how the government can “attract the investment needed for the future, speed up infrastructure delivery and restore confidence in the sector”. Not everyone has high hopes for it.

“This government that claims it’s getting rid of bureaucracy has created more than 20 new public bodies, and they’ve been in office for less than a year,” says Gale. “It’s this desire to bolt on layers of bureaucracy, when what we need is one organisation that does the job properly.”

Buckley, however, thinks Cunliffe is well suited to the task at hand. “I’ve met him several times, and as an individual I have a lot of confidence in him,” she says.

“He has a lot of experience working in the financial regulation sector… The situation we have with the water companies is a lot less about water, and a lot more about finances – so I think he is the right person to look at it.”

By taking a “co-ordinated” approach to water infrastructure, Buckley is hopeful that ministers will succeed in getting the different companies to work together, which she believes has been a key missing ingredient.

“They’ve got the monopoly on their own geography, but they have very little interest in co-operating with a water company in a different area,” she points out. “What we’re changing is bringing them together and saying, ‘Unless you co-operate with the government, effectively your days are numbered.’”