Water covers 71% of the planet. The UK gets plenty of rain most of the time, and has still been getting plenty of rain in the North whilst the south is dry. We had a wet winter and watched as the authorities allowed billions of gallons to rush to the seas without storing enough of it in case the summer was as dry as 1976 or 1995.
Worse still the population of the UK has grown by 4 million over the last ten years, mainly migrants needing homes and a water supply. The highly regulated monopoly regional companies did not put in new reservoirs to meet this extra demand. The Regulator did not want the extra cost on bills. In my area the necessary plan to build a large new reservoir at Abingdon to handle all the additional demand and new homes was foolishly delayed.
The Havant new reservoir was underway when Labour took over. The government is now taking a leisurely look at another nine projects. Abingdon is back on the list, with an application expected later this year. It is thought it will be well into 2028 before permission is granted to start work.Some think it might complete around 2040.
There needs to be a much greater sense of urgency. Labour promised to speed up the building of infrastructure. More reservoirs, bigger pipes and additional dirty water treatment works are much needed.Why the delay? Why lecture people on using less water when there is so much of it, and you do not destroy it by using it? Why think this is about the climate when it is mainly about population growth and about an inadequate and ageing infrastructure that needs modernising.
August 7, 2026
There needs to be a much greater sense of urgency. Labour promised to speed up the building of infrastructure. More reservoirs, bigger pipes and additional dirty water treatment works
This was also the tories reasoning for selling off the water companies, I remember well all these water companies saying the money they get for selling off water companies would be piled back into the infrastructure but NO the money they made out of us then and now goes straight to the shareholders pockets so stop taking us for mugs and build more efficient pipe work more reservoirs and if possible desalination plants around the U.K.
Reply Raising private capital was not the problem. Nationalised water was starved of capital as it all counted as public spending. The problem is the Regulator refusing new reservoirs and treatment works to keep bills down.
August 7, 2026
As usual our archaic planning laws discourage new infrastructure plus of course having water shortages feeds the global warming narrative.
Planning for HMOs and change of use for barracks doesn’t suffer the same delays, I wonder why that is.
We’re told there’s been a dramatic rise in wild fires when most are arson and made worse by poor land management due to rewilding. For centuries farmers have been managing the land to promote growth aswell as dredging ditches until the government got in the way.
Everything the uniparty has done this past 30 years, be it electricity, water sewage or land management has been to the detriment if the individual and people are thoroughly sick of it.
August 7, 2026
And bills must be kept down so that the population don’t understand what the migrant population costs us.
August 7, 2026
Or net zero or renewables or the £600bn spend on dangerous and ineffective Covid “vaccines”, or the benefits for the healthy but feckless so as to augment them each day or HS2…
August 7, 2026
Good morning my Lord.
I could never understand, having been forced onto a water meter because our area has limited water, why they gave permission to builds thousands of new homes in our area.
Something to think about… The average person is seventy percent water or every ten stone person contains seven stones of water. With the population increasing, more and more water is tied up in the newcomers.
August 7, 2026
AI tells me ‘Building a typical brick, block, and concrete house requires about 4,000 gallons (roughly 18,000 litres) of “embedded” or operational water built directly into the structure (such as in concrete foundations, mortar, and plaster), plus extra water used on-site for mixing and dust control.’
The Labour government pledged to build 1.5 million new homes over five years (an average of 300,000 annually) by the 2029 general election.
August 7, 2026
Good morning
Does anyone in this country know what they are doing ? The Chinese government is stacked with engineers and professionals. People who can understand a problem and come to solutions to fix it. We’ve got people whose only skill is the ability to talk a good game.
What are the problems and what are the solutions ? If the problem is some law, then change the law. If the problem is some company that just gouges the consumer, threaten them with Nationalisation.
You are Parliament. You are supposed to be sovereign. Act like it !
Reply Nationalised water was worse.
August 7, 2026
“Does anyone in this country know what they are doing ? The Chinese government is stacked with engineers and professionals. People who can understand a problem and come to solutions to fix it.”
Well not many and those that do are rarely in government or in power. Witness the coerced net harm Covid Vaccines, the lockdowns, HS2, energy policy and May’s net zero (nodded through without even any vote).
Parliament is stuffed with PPE, English, Law, Classics, Politics… graduates who in general have zero grasp of energy, logic, maths, transport, engineering or real economics.
So Kemi in an article about Rod Little in the Spectator says she is against cancel culture – so is she going to offer Andrew Bridgen the Tory Whip back which was removed by Sunak for his crime of telling inconvenient truths about the Covid “Vaccines”. Today she says she will kick immigrants out of Social Housing but how can she and the party ever be trusted again?
The best thing to do with social housing is to charge the market rate to all with those who need help with rent getting it. Why should two people earning the same have hugely different disposable incomes simply because one has subsidised house and one does not. Also why would they ever move out of this less than half price house or flat?
August 7, 2026
LL
‘ Parliament is stuffed with PPE, English, Law, Classics, Politics… graduates who in general have zero grasp of energy, logic, maths, transport, engineering or real economics.’
Well one of the people you are so fond of quoting along, with Allister Heath, is David Starkey. Starkey quotes either Theodore Roosevelt or Churchill as saying ‘ You want your scientists, that’s the general word for experts, on tap but not on top’.
So a measured assessment, rather than one driven by knowledge without reference to other considerations.
August 8, 2026
The problem is also that recent politicians have generally chosen rather dire and often dishonest “experts” too. Experts that tell them what they wanted to hear or were compromised with other vested interests. People like Gove, even fell for “experts” like Grata Thunberg. Education “experts” who wanted to kill private schools
This especially on Net Zero, Climate Alarmism, Energy Policy, Water Policy, Economic Policy, Covid Vaccines even coerced into healthy children and people who had had Covid already… Not honourable and sensible experts like Angus Dalgleish. See his (et al) excellent Death of science book.
In the USA we had take the 5th Anthony Fauchi types rather than the sensible Barrington Declaration people. We also seem to have rather dire and incompetent defence procurement experts too. We were clearly lied to in the US and UK at government levels over the Covid Origins anmd the Covid Vaccines also on the economic “benefits” of mass low skilled immigration. This government seems to have economic experts who think the way to growth is more taxes, more red tape, more government, more open door immigration and more power for local Mayor’s and local politicians!
August 7, 2026
The Chinese have no politicians or ‘Parliament’.
Their Government is the Civil Service.
August 7, 2026
and they all do what they are told – or else.
August 7, 2026
Well there has not been enough investment in storage, processing, treatment plants… due mainly to very poor regulators, regulation and planners.
In the short terms it is this easier to blame it on “climate change” and have hose pipe bans.
I am no fan of ex London Mayor Ken Livingstone. But I remembered him urging Londoners to save water by not flushing the toilet after urinating, publicly aligning himself with the “environmental” maxim, “If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down”.
This does actually safe a lot of water (and money) or perhaps better just using grey water for flushing. But in such a wet country more water storage or fewer people is perhaps better. No need for desalination in the wet UK. Desalination it is very energy intensive and our energy is a rip off due to the Ed and Theresa May’s deluded CO2 devil gas religion. Warmer air actually usually delivers more rain precipitation and not less.
August 7, 2026
Broken Britain again.
We hear of rail passengers facing major delays today because of a power outage, it’s all part of the same problem. This has not appeared suddenly under a Labour government either.
‘The Regulator’ is blamed. When has a regulator ever fixed anything. Why do we even have them?
I expect this will turn into another privatisation/nationalisation discussion. It’s more a case of JFDI.
August 7, 2026
Here’s the thing – mention is made of the ‘authorities’ allowing billions of gallons to rush to the sea then we read how the ‘regulator’ did not want the extra cost on bills and as we see the Labour Government is now slowing everything up – but somebody has to be in charge some single office has to bear responsibity because what we have is a charter for finger pointing.
August 7, 2026
Depending on how you define QUANGO (Quasi Autonomous Non Government Organisations) there are 603 of them. Calling them Non-Departmental Public Bodies, stripping away core non-ministerial departments to focus purely on independent boards, tribunals, and regulators yields an exact count of 438 quangos.
These bodies are responsible for ~£391 billion in annual expenditure (representing roughly 32% of all state spending) and collectively they employ employ about 500,000 staff members. Not to mention their non-contributory, index linked final salary pensions. Nice work if you can get it. Jobs for the old boys and girls!
The Labour government has proposed or established 22 new public bodies—such as Great British Energy, the National Wealth Fund, and Skills England. Following a cross-government audit initiated by Cabinet Office Minister Pat McFadden, the administration has begun restructuring these numbers, most notably executing plans to abolish and absorb NHS England – the UK’s largest single quango – directly back into the Department of Health and Social Care to cut duplication and the severe administration costs
NHS England was costing us ~£175 billion a year. The Education and Skills Funding Agency is spending ~£73 billion and HMRC is costing us ~£41 billion. Huge sums
If Healey wants to save money for defence or other of Burnham’s priorities, QUANGO’s are the place to start
August 7, 2026
+1
August 7, 2026
Net zero and hs2 and quangos and the benefit bill, and opening the north see, fracking & closing the borders to start then a bonfire of red tape. U turns on everything Labour has stood for so far.
August 7, 2026
The Exit must be open at the border.
Millions MUST AND WILL GO.
August 7, 2026
SG:
I agree with you completely. We should start with the CCC (Climate Change Committee). There is no climate crisis and the Left would not have invented it if their “solution”, Net Zero, was not sabotaging our energy and consequently destroying our industry, economy and national security. CO2, anthropogenic (3% of emissions) or natural (97% of emissions) does not control the temperature as evidenced by the Antarctic Vostok ice core data showing that for the last 450,000 years, whilst both CO2 and temperature have been exceptionally low, CO2 has followed temperature and not vice versa. Even the New Scientist, a strong advocate of the IPCC’s CO2 radiative forcing theory, contains a report where the new Allan Hills Antarctic ice core samples have, they say, unexpectedly shown there to be a warmer period than today 3 million years ago despite lower levels of CO2 and methane. Hardly a surprise to Happer & Wijngaarden who have shown, using the IPCC’s own radiative warming theory, that there is already sufficient CO2 in the atmosphere to absorb all the IR radiation emitted by the planet that it is available to it and hence adding further CO2 to the atmosphere adds very little, if any, warming. A phenomenon known as saturation which is endorsed by The Royal Society.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2519771-ice-core-reveals-low-co2-during-warm-spell-3-million-years-ago/
August 7, 2026
We know full the World has had ICE ages with far higher CO2 too. We currently have a relative dearth of CO2 in historical terms.
August 7, 2026
So, ~£391 billion, spent seemingly without any accountability, or responsibility. The UK Parliament and its Government is handing over this money they by Law have commandeered off the hardworking people of this Country but then they shrug their shoulders as if to say ‘not me Guv, its them’. Generally it is those that pay the ‘bill’ that call the tune so to speak. If the bill payer stops paying then ‘what’
That then begs the question why do we empower and pay 650 MPs to look after our interests, to spend ‘our’ money to achieve a return? If your analysis is correct , and there is nothing to suggest it isn’t we could get rid of Parliament today and become better off
August 7, 2026
Abingdon Reservoir has been on the cards for the last 30 years, but like so many other projects all past plans have been rejected after opposition.
Time we learnt in this country that if compulsory purchase is necessary, then we compensate people well and properly at the outset, by paying them at least 50% more than the market value of their home or business, at the moment it ends up costing many, many times more than that with delay, after delay, after delay.
Other Countries seem to be able to get on with huge infrastructure projects rapidly without the sort of delays we have or experience, especially when frogs, newts, or bats are concerned.
August 7, 2026
30 years A bit like Heathrow and Gatwick runways nuclear power stations…
August 7, 2026
Worse still, due to the rollout of the governments new compulsory rubbish collection system we will all be using more water simply to comply with the extravagant rules or risk paying a hefty fine.
Apart from the organic waste containers that need a regular washing, we are told that cans and plastic containers must be washed or the rubbish bin for renewables will be rejected.
Socialists love arbitrary rules and I can’t blame the local council for doing what HMG demands, but it is most likely that residues of food will remain in these washed cans and plastic containers – so if the system can work with that why do we need to wash them?
The point is that we are all going to waste an excessive amount of water just complying with unnecessary bureaucratic commands, and this at a time of drought!
August 7, 2026
I came home from a short break yesterday to find an e-mail invite from South-East water, asking me to tell them what I think should be done to help the water situation in and around Kent.
I told them pretty much what you have just told us Lord JR.
Why do I think they’ll ignore my thoughts and indeed the thoughts of all that responded to their invite……
Reply I also responded to their enquiries which were embedded in thinking against simply supplying more water from more reservoirs!
August 7, 2026
I agree. I have been aware of the intention to build a new reservoir at Abingdon for more than 40 Years. Now it is too little, too late.
August 7, 2026
A few years ago someone put forward a national grid grid for water using rivers and canals to move water around the country. It fell on deaf ears.
August 7, 2026
Here’s an idea. Deport all the people who shouldn’t be in our country. This will solve most of the problems we have.
August 7, 2026
And all the health people claiming benefits
August 7, 2026
On average we use 150 litres of water a day . Increase the population by 10 million increases demand by 1.5 billion litres of water per day.
Did any of our geniuses in the British establishment figure this out when they threw open our borders to the world? Or more likely it never crossed the tiny minds who rule us ,who never figured out that additional people they were adding would need additional housing, additional road space, additional water supplies, additional everything.
August 7, 2026
Perhaps they hoped the increased Covid death rate would equal the migration rate?
August 7, 2026
Well life expectancy has declined but it seems this is due more to the Covid “vaccines” that due to Covid. Higher death even in younger people who were at virtually zero risk of Covid. Timing rather well with the vaccine roll outs by age. But needless to say they are resisting all the freedom of information requests.
August 7, 2026
Nail, head, you got it in one !
August 7, 2026
You can easily organise life using less than 1/20 of that but why should we have to in a country with no shortage of rainfall?
August 7, 2026
The Data Centres we currently have, before we build more, need millions of litres of water each day. I gather at absolute peak it can be as much as 14 million litres per day although the average can be about half that figure depending on locality, resources and cooling type of individual DCs. It seems HMG is focussed on using their ability to power grab & force through planning permissions etc., for more.
August 7, 2026
Well the date centres do not actually eat or use up this water it is only for cooling can be in a closed system or could even use seawater.
August 7, 2026
The old adage comes to mind. If you owe your Bank £100 they will pursue with aggression and it is you that has a problem, if you owe the Bank £100million they hesitate, step back, it is the Bank that has the problem.
With water its a similar scenario there is no customer to please, no customer service required, they the customer can’t walk they are the hostage. Government, the regulator it runs, is powerless the money has already escaped and for the most part abroad. Look at British Steel it owes Jingye £960million, it will be the Taxpayer by demand from Government that pays. The Government if it worked for the UK, its People, their electorate, could at least have the monoliths broken up. Even for what is referred to as the Water Industry, they could with baby steps, bring in tandem time limited contract only infrastructure, have different organisation building and running new reservoirs, new sewerage works, the networks, the pipelines to the new builds and so on. i.e. act to remove or at lest reduce the ‘blackmail’ threat that is costing us dear.
Water is the next Steel Industry. Along with the Energy Industry, all being crippled by a clueless Parliament Unfortunately we have clueless Numpties in Parliament that have yet to grasp that they are in fact the directors of UK.plc, running a Country in a ‘dog-eat-dog’ competitive World. There are no friends or as 2TK called the Partners to bail us out, as they are the same World Competitors that want our hard earned money – they see things rightly as ‘them or us’
Then we also learn another UK Ai (Volta) startup valued at £7.5 billion wants to stay in the UK, but the UK Parliament fights it, in order to survive it has to go to Norway for its Databank store, it energy at a competitive price. How long before its UK listing moves abroad?
The UK Parliament thinks they are isolated from the World, they want to bury their heads in the sand and hope the World goes away. The only priority is some personal, very personal, proven wrong time and time again political religious ideology – that’s the do or die of the UK Parliament. This has morphed into the most anti UK Parliament – whose the likes never been seen on this Planet before
August 7, 2026
Americans are often derided by the London lanyard climate alarmist woke for having no knowledge about anything which takes place outside of their state. However, these people have no problem in believing that the weather they are experiencing in the south east of England applies to the whole of the UK and ignore the weather elsewhere in the country. So they believe the current warm weather and drought in the south east of England applies to the whole of the UK and is evidence of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming when in fact the rain in Scotland is normal for their summer and the west of Scotland is expected to have their usual 100mm of rain which compares with the south east England’s normal summer rainfall of 50mm. If we are prepared to spend hundreds of £billions to transport electricity from wind turbines located in Scotland and out into the North Sea to England why are we not prepared to transport water from the west of Scotland down south to resolve the water shortages in England? I have seen an estimate for £14bn to do this, which was described as “astronomical”. But HS2 is costing £100bn and we are spending £100bn to upgrade the National Grid in order to bring expensive chaotically intermittent wind generated electricity from Scotland and the North Sea down to England where exists the demand and hence £14bn to solve England’s water shortages looks good value for money in comparison.
August 7, 2026
@Original Richard – yet the Met Office then say that this hot weather is down to the atmosphere being less polluted and the sunshine getting through. That doesn’t help the water situation just highlights what is to come.
Nothing will change we have a Parliament worried about the next election, the Government staying in power so suggesting things that will take more than 3 years to complete is landing on deaf ears.
August 7, 2026
IB:
Yes, the cleaner atmosphere could well be allowing more sunshine to reach the planet’s surface and could be leading to an increase in surface temperature. But there is no climate crisis caused by burning fossil fuels and thereby increasing the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. The planet has always experienced climate change and there is no “correct temperature”. At the moment we have a slight increase of 0.14C/decade, which I’d rather happen than another decline to an ice age. At least this way the planet is greening and more food is able to be grown. Those who believe the climate changes are anthropogenic are as deluded as those who believed that the tides could be anthropogenically controlled.
August 7, 2026
The previous project for an Abingdon reservoir was cancelled in March 2011 by the Coalition Government. At the time the Environment Agency and the group against it declared (without even laughing) that water recycling and leakage reduction would be more effective than a new reservoir for providing the Thames Valley with water. Given the sustained results at leak reduction by Thames Water since privatisation (-40% (roughly 1.1% per year since privatisation in 1989) and thanks it seems to the deployment of an increasing number of smart water meters) we obviously have to take all of Sir John’s nice words as ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’. We are polite, after all it is his blog …
But the questions in his last paragraph however are bordering on the ridiculous: are the Kent and Sussex people deprived again of water these last few days suffering from ‘’there is so much water’ in Britain? Are the eight British reservoirs low (Clywedog, Dove group, Grafham, Hanningfield, Lower Thames group, Clatworthy) or exceptionally low ((Windleball, Blagdon) only because of population? On a wider scale are the Rhine, the Loire, the Rhone, the Po and the Danube at low levels (with impact on agriculture, cooling of nuclear energy plants, freight transport) mainly just about increased population?
Adjust your blinkers …
BTW the good Dr Spencer has now a slope of 0.16C/decade on his 1979-present graph and if computed from the last ten years 0.179 with 0.48C globally averaged for July ‘26 (nsstc.uah.edu drroyspencer.com).
And in other news Fred Pearce 16/07/2024 (e360.yale.edu ‘With CO2 levels rising, world’s drylands are turning green’) warns that this added vegetation may soak up scarce water supplies and potentially increase the risk of brushfires. Can never win on all fronts …
August 7, 2026
I note you hardly mentioned the large increase in population since 2000 as a cause hefner.
Some ten million extra water consumers since 2000.
And you didn’t grasp the point Lord Redwood made about our failure to store water to use in drier summer times, especially the failure to transfer from higher rainfall areas to the drier southern more populated areas.
But I’m glad you outlined some of the reasons reservoirs were not built, as they should have been, over recent decades.
August 8, 2026
The existing reservoirs were practically full at the end of winter (>90% full, yourweather.co.uk 24/02/2026). Those in the South became low or extremely low following the repeated high temperatures from May.
How would you or Lord Redwood make sure that more water be stored in those reservoirs given that there is right now no practical way to transfer from northern higher rainfall areas to southern more populated areas? It was quite simply a performative blog for people like you …
The transfer of water (Thames Water’s T2ST, Canal & River Trust’s projects, the other Inter-Basin Transfer projects) is now scheduled to be completed between 2035-2040, even 2075 for Southern Water. In the meantime Southern Water is pushing for its HWTWRP by 2030. Check it it is guaranteed to bring a laugh.
IBT: ‘The feasibility of inter-basin water transfers to manage climate risks in England’, Clim.Risk Management, 2021, doi.org/10.1016/j.crm.2021.100322.
watermagazine.co.uk, 26/06/2026 ‘HWTWRP’
watermagazine.co.uk, 07/08/2026 ‘Water industry warns WRMP 29 guidance risks underestimating England’s future water shortages’.
Reply I did urge having 100% full last winter to give a stronger start position. I have long advocated more reservoir capacity. I have urged more grant diverted from wilding to more farm reservoirs. I have proposed water competition which would likely lead to more installed systems to re use rain from the roof for toilet flushing, garden watering etc. Why do you always wish to carp and be so negative. This blog is for people who think things can be better run with different approaches.
August 8, 2026
“people like me”
Explain what you mean by yhat comment hefner.
Is it anyone who dares to challenge your views?
August 8, 2026
Again you miss the point hefner.
You are just stating what the current position is.
Despite record population growth since 2000, little has been done to develop the transfer of water between areas nor build extra storage capacity to meet greatly increased demand.
August 8, 2026
And where/with whom do you think the responsibility for this state of things lies, if not the water company executives who have for years privileged the dividends and not the investments in reservoirs?
The last reservoir to start its operations was Carsington in 1992. By then water had been privatised and the debts of the new private companies had been reset to zero. So water companies could have invested in more than water treatment plants.
Population has indeed grown by 10 m since 2000. A reservoir takes 3-4 years to be built after it had been fully authorised. How many could have been built in the 25 years since 2000?
Just as an aside, anthropogenic climate change has been on the news since the first IPCC report in 1990. The original results on this first reports although not geographically precise have been essentially confirmed on a global scale in all subsequent IPCC literature and observations, even the impact on migration discussed in the so-called volumes 3 since 2001.
The EU opened to the Eastern countries in 2004 and 2007 with the UK, contrary to most ‘old’ EU countries, not asking for a moratorium before people could move to the UK. In 2015 with the Syrian civil war 1.8 m migrants arrived in Germany, a few tens of thousands moved on to other countries. In 2016 with Brexit then with Covid a non-negligible fraction (50-60%) of Europeans left the UK but 4-5 m stayed in the UK with the majority having got the EUSS (special status). Those who had left (Polish plumbers and the like) were then replaced by people from outside Europe.
So what’s the reason for such a description: simply to point out that the 10 m who had arrived since 2000 did so over 25 years and one could have thought that between the state agencies and the utilities companies there could have been much better planning and execution to ensure that water would continue to be available on the taps even during summers.
So let me be sceptical of those who appear to discover now the situation that has grown steadily over the years and its now pressing consequences.
Reply I and some others have been pressing for more reservoirs and treatment works since 1997. My own constituency very visibly needed more capacity. The Regulators took the view that people should use less water and companies should mend pipes to reduce big losses, to avoid substantial capital commitments which would have required price rises
August 8, 2026
Thames Water since its privatisation in 1989 has distributed £10.4 bn of dividends while significantly impacting its infrastructure investments by diverting funds away from maintenance and necessary upgrades, paying substantial dividends while accumulating high levels of debt (£18.5 bn 15/07/2026 ‘Thames Water shareholders desperate to keep hands on cash cow monopoly’)
committees.parliament.uk 15/05/2024 Environmental Audit Committee on regulation of water companies: a longish document rather technical by a professional auditor.
Please read (at least) the concluding remarks.
August 9, 2026
No mention by hefner I note of the dead hand of thr EU Water Directive which our UK Government followed to the letter.
Trying to get planning permission for new reservoirs was very difficult under that framework.
Hefner repeats the myth of no investment because of dividends bring paid.
It was governments who failed to invest properly for decades when the water industry was state owned.
For example SevernTrent, who pay good dividends to investors, are also spending a record £15 billion between 3025 and 2030.
Would Burnham have been able to spend that much in just one water area?
August 9, 2026
The EU Water Directive did not prevent EU countries to have new reservoirs, desalination plants or intra-regional water transfer projects from happening. These were often organised in public (regional/municipal)-private partnerships.
Look a bit better at what were/are the reasons why planning permissions were refused/delayed.
Severn Water: £15bn by 2030. Could it be that the threat to the private model has suddenly motivated the ‘shareholders’/management as it appears to have been doing with Thames Water’s? Just a question.
August 9, 2026
Furthermore you should be aware that since 2017 the EU Water Framework Directive does not apply anymore. The UK Water Environment Regulations 2017 (Water Framework Directive, England and Wales) applies.
So since 2017 England and Wales can do whatever they want following these new regulations in relation to National Significant Infrastructure Project applications.
Look for it in gov.uk
August 7, 2026
so, pre- Industrial revolution was it hotter, people getting serious sunburn, skin cancers etc?
August 7, 2026
It is hard to add anything to your comments, Lord Redwood, and those of your commentators. So I can only endorse the article and the comments made.
How shocking that those who have allowed a population growth of around 10 million in the last twenty-six years did not have any vision or foresight about the impact on our water supplies, Housing, GPs, Hospitals, roads and the cost of welfare.
Proverbs 20.18 – Where there is no vision, the people perish!
August 7, 2026
KfL :
Of course they knew the consequences, which is why it happened! The proof of this is that they are still allowing mass legal and illegal immigration. Will they even attempt to stop the “small” boats coming across the Channel? How many more illegal immigrants will be coming this way?
August 7, 2026
@Keith from Leeds – we see neglect everywhere and it starts in the UK Parliament, its appointed Government. They all want to sit on their hands, do nothing, get paid and at best spout some weird personal ideological religion that they identify as being politics. What they wont do is manage, manage themselves, the Country so that it can compete in this World – the want the World to go away so as to live in some deluded dream
August 7, 2026
Should be Proverbs 29.18
August 7, 2026
creaking at the seams?Quean Anne:Population of Great Britain and Ireland 6million max.From which John Churchill forged the allied defeat of Louis Le Grand..Moving on `00yrs later Arthur Wellesley from a home base
of under 9million forged the alliance that put paid to Napoleon once and for all.Our American friends make
much of the Battle of New Orleans and all credit to Andrew Jackson.Fact:our limited “fighting men” resources
were across the channel preparing for Waterloo.Today we have 70million population(who really knows) our basic
supply infrastructure is not fit for purpose nor is our demand provision.I estimate a pool of at least 1million
young men 18-25 yrs of age available if not to fight wars but to don workwear and boots and get digging
and get us out of the hole we are now in
August 8, 2026
The local Conservative MPs opposed the Abingdon reservoir project for years so I don’t know why you are only now complaining about delays. Their LibDem replacements and LibDem local councils continue that opposition via lawfare so you can hardly blame Labour.
Reply I and several other Thames Valley MPs supported it. The Regulator blocked it.
August 10, 2026
Inadequate planning of water supplies seems to have been a problem for decades. It is inevitable that with rapid population increase the situation would deteriorate. Few, if any, public services, aside from the military, are designed to be adaptable or flexible. In my own fights with treasury, the hardest argument to put to it is to pay for reserve capacity in case it might be needed. It is always the first item they delete. It will only fund what is required beyond all possible doubt. And silos persist so it is not joined up across departments.