Britain's water crisis

October 8, 2015 11:43 AM

The risk here is not that millions of people in Britain are suddenly going to die of thirst. It is that after all those years in which humans settled by rivers and thrived, we are now locked in conflict with our natural surroundings. Either the humans or the rivers have to suffer. At the moment, it is the rivers, although in the longer term a sick river will produce less water, so the humans will end up in trouble as well. (longformGrauniad)
posted by Kitteh (12 comments total)

> The future looks even more worrying.

Yeah, there's a lot of that going around these days.
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:52 AM on October 8, 2015 [2 favorites]

“All it takes,” said Crake, “is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it’s game over forever.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

posted by Fizz at 11:56 AM on October 8, 2015 [9 favorites]

From TFA:

This summer, Southern Water was convicted in court of breaching its environmental permit after dumping 40m litres of raw human sewage into the sea at Worthing in September 2012, because three pumps had failed at a treatment works and were threatening to push the sewage back into the town. “Three pumps?” said Jim. “That sounds to me like a maintenance problem. They’re not checking them often enough, the way they used to before they were privatised.”

Remember what Thatcher said back in 1986, a few years before her government decided to privatise the country's water industry? "Indeed, the weakness of the case for State ownership has become all too apparent. For state planners do not have to suffer the consequences of their mistakes. It's the taxpayers who have to pick up the bill. This Government has rolled back the frontiers of the State, and will roll them back still further."

And since then, household water bills have increased threefold - but corporate taxpayers don't have to pick up that bill...
posted by Doktor Zed at 12:01 PM on October 8, 2015 [12 favorites]

Privatization almost always seems to wind up costing people more, but at least your money is going directly to a corporation which probably pays far less in taxes than it should instead of the government, which will return some of your money to you in the form of public services.
posted by The Card Cheat at 12:06 PM on October 8, 2015 [12 favorites]

So, things have been getting better with the end of manufacturing in the UK, but painfully slowly: the rising population from immigration outweighs ongoing reductions in consumption per head: and climate change means everything gets worse.

The State of National Capital (Referenced in the article):

More people were added to England’s population in the decade leading up to 2011 than in any previous decade in recorded history and this rapid population growth is projected to continue, with more than eight million people set to be added over the next 25 years.

From the article itself:

The government’s own National Capital Committee, in its 2014 report, has pointed out the problem with that: “While personal consumption is expected to fall between now and 2030, the expected growth in population will offset this, and total demand is, therefore, expected to rise significantly.”

Given the background, then, not awful, but much to do. I don't expect this Government to do it, sadly.
posted by alasdair at 12:10 PM on October 8, 2015

It's OK, because we can buy water from China.
posted by pipeski at 12:11 PM on October 8, 2015

Perhaps coincidentally I read this piece by Monbiot on river pollution and the EA just before finding this thread. He's also been tracking the relationship between farming policy (in particular deforestation) and flooding in the UK.
posted by Grangousier at 12:14 PM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

Thankfully, we're melting the ice caps, so as soon as Nestle can get a bottling plant up there, the water problem will be solved. Everyone's a winner!
posted by Thorzdad at 12:21 PM on October 8, 2015 [2 favorites]

I want to be a Keeper of the River!
posted by srboisvert at 1:13 PM on October 8, 2015

the rising population from immigration outweighs ongoing reductions in consumption per head:

Funny, because from where I'm sitting it's the rich white folks with generations of English ancestors who keep watering their giant lawns in the middle of the night when the hose pipe bans come in.

It's the area under the consumption distribution that matters, not the mean, and sure as hell not the national origin of the consumer.
posted by cromagnon at 4:52 PM on October 8, 2015

I want to be a Keeper of the River!

Lots of places have similar positions, either official or voluntary, though mostly not with the power of arrest as described in the article, and they do critically important work.

I read the article as describing a situation where the political will and regulatory regime are clearly deeply inferior to the level of problem at hand. I had thought that the EU's WFD had more teeth to it, more like how in the US having a river listed as a 303d impaired water under the Clean Water Act can trigger a follow-on set of actions and oversight. (I don't mean to sound like the US system is perfect -- it is not at all, and the same floodplain development that the article focuses on is continuing unimpeded in almost every river basin in the United States.)

But for an island nation with such starkly limited resources and a high population density to be so casual with water is surprising to me, naively perhaps.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:53 PM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

Funny, because from where I'm sitting it's the rich white folks with generations of English ancestors who keep watering their giant lawns in the middle of the night when the hose pipe bans come in.

Unless you're sitting somewhere where you have read a different article, that's not correct: it says average usage is falling. Though maybe that's immigrants using less water, not natives?
posted by alasdair at 3:13 AM on October 10, 2015