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England has enough available water to supply only 420,000 of the 1.5 million new homes the government has pledged this Parliament, according to analysis commissioned by the industry body Water UK. The research, carried out by the consultancy Public First, warns that some parts of the country have only a 2 per cent buffer between the water available and the water used, leaving little room for new housing without reform.
Two causes
Water UK’s report, Barriers to Project Delivery, attributes the shortfall to two main factors. Successive governments have blocked new reservoir applications while planning rules slow the delivery of infrastructure, and the regulatory framework requires new water resources to be designed around reduced future consumption rather than actual usage. Chief executive David Henderson said the industry wanted to provide enough water for new housing but was “being held back by a regulatory system” that makes building reservoirs slower than it should be, adding that most of the fix does not need new legislation.
Among the proposed reforms, Water UK wants water schemes granted the same fast-track planning route used for major projects such as the Universal Studios development, which cut its process from two years to six months, and permitted development rights extended so companies can install equipment, such as the 3,500 water quality monitors required by 2030, without a separate application for each.
The data centre blind spot
A central warning concerns the water demands of data centres, which Water UK says are explicitly excluded from the Environment Agency’s National Framework for Water Resources, the document that sets national water strategy. Their additional demand from cooling is therefore not counted in resource planning, even as the sector expands.
The scale is significant. Separate analysis found that 84 per cent of proposed UK data centres are earmarked for areas already under water stress, concentrated in the drier east and south east. Data centres currently use around 6.6 million litres of water a day, equivalent to about 20,000 homes, but Water UK’s evidence to Parliament noted that individual developers have requested access to up to 21 million litres a day. The Environment Agency projects that England’s public water supply could face a shortfall of more than 5 billion litres a day by 2050 without further action. Water UK’s central argument is that the answer lies in how water resources are planned and approved, rather than in a choice between growth and supply.
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