The UK government has been accused of a lack of transparency and of acting irresponsibly for refusing to publish the emergency drought plans that are produced by water companies. Water firms are required to publish statutory drought plans every five years to detail the actions needed to ensure public water supply is maintained and the environment is protected during drought. Water levels at five key reservoirs in England and Wales are now “exceptionally low” and three-quarters of England and the whole of Wales are in drought.
The 2027-32 drought plans, which are under consultation, detail what will happen in different scenarios, with the most extreme actions ranging from standpipes in the street to rota cuts, where water is limited to a few hours each day. Alongside these publicly available plans, water companies are required to produce separate emergency drought plans. A water industry source said these plans were not published to avoid alarming the public.
The government said the plans were not published for security reasons. Alastair Chisholm, the water, policy, regulation and governance lead at the consultancy firm Arup, said that in the “new normal” of the climate crisis causing droughts to become more frequent and more extreme, there would probably be situations where “some quite difficult decisions need to be taken with some quite significant imposition’s on people’s lifestyles”. He pointed to Day Zero in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2018, when millions of households faced drastic water shortages after the worst drought to hit the city in almost a century.
Prof Liz Bentley, the chief executive of the Royal Meteorological Society, said it made sense not to publish these plans because drought could lead to widespread impacts on certain critical industries. For example, recent drought and extreme heat in Europe forced several nuclear power plants to shut down. In some areas of England, the impact of water shortages is already being felt.
Sussex, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Norfolk have all seen housing and business development delayed due to water supply availability and ageing or inadequate water infrastructure. Water shortages are also affecting food security, with global food prices at a three-year high as heatwaves, drought and war push up the cost of crops. With water increasingly becoming a scarce commodity and as demand for water increases due to the rapid growth of water-hungry industries such as datacentres, the trade body Water UK recently told the Guardian it had asked the government to publish a drought hierarchy to set out which sectors would be prioritised in times of water shortages, but that ministers had yet to do so.
Ollie Hayes, the head of big tech and campaigns at the campaign group Global Action Plan, said that amid increasing concern that datacentres could be prioritised over other sectors for water, it was irresponsible for the government to keep its emergency drought plans from the public. Will water-hungry AI datacentres be prioritised in a drought emergency? The secrecy only adds to a sense that controversial decisions like this may have already been made,” he said.
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